


Bones and Blighted Roses

by Laguera25



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Disability, F/M, Gen, Physical Disability, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-16 03:09:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 129,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1329601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Enterprise discovers a cryotube adrift in space, it reignites restless fears of Khan and his colony of genetically-enhanced superhumans, but what's inside turns out to be anything but, and Dr. McCoy finds himself face to face with living medical history.  There's more inside than a medical marvel from a bygone era and a chance at medical superstardom, however, and sometimes, it takes the deft hands of a surgeon to make things whole again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Interstellar Hitchiker Off the Starboard Bow

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic nearly a year ago with the intention of posting it in its entirety when it was complete. However, reality has intervened. If I wait, this fic might never see the light of day because typing with a single finger is a hard slog. So I have decided to begin posting the extant chapters. I cannot promise that this fic will be finished. Sometimes the body gives out despite the best of intentions. I hope you enjoy what is here, though, and if I can finish it, I surely will.

"Captain, long-range sensors are picking up a life form."

That was, he would reflect later over his glass of Romulan ale, how it all started, and it was fitting, he supposed, that a man who had lost everything when he had boarded a transport bound for the Academy should find it again in the black waste of deep space, drifting through the nothingness like a splinter from some long-forgotten shipwreck.

Jim, slumped in his seat, straightened, suddenly alert. "What kind of life form, Sulu?"

"Hard to say, sir. We're still too far out to get a good read."

"Is it a ship?" 

"I don't think so, sir. The readings I can get indicate that it's a single life form."

"Could it be a shuttle?"

"Possibly."

"Captain, as far as I am aware, there are no other Federation vessels in the vicinity." Spock's stentorian voice drifted from his post behind them, and Dr. Leonard McCoy didn't have to look to know that those keen eyes were bright at the prospect of another mystery. 

"Could it be an alien vessel?"

"As we have just begun our exploration of this area, anything is possible." Spock descended the small dais that separated him from the bridge proper, hands clasped behind his back. "However, our preliminary intelligence reports indicate that there are no M-class planets in the vicinity."

"So, we've got an interstellar drifter on our hands?" Jim's tone was conversational, but McCoy could sense the excitement underneath, and his own pulse quickened in response. The last time Jim had sounded like that, McCoy had been treated to the distinct pleasure of running through the dense, red forests of Nibiru, dodging rocks and spears and plummeting over a cliff into a churning sea.

 _So much for a quiet shift,_ he thought desultorily, and shifted in his seat.

It had been quiet, too. Hell, after the relaunch, the whole damn voyage had been quiet. There were the occasional fights in the ship's bar, when big mouths fed bigger egos and matters were settled with swinging fists and flying decanters, and there was that unfortunate accident with a trainee barber, but it was nothing that a bandage and an analgesic hypo couldn't fix. Weeks when by where he did not see a single patient, and frankly, that suited him just fine. After the Khan debacle, he welcomed a bout of unremitting routine.

And here it was, about to be blown to hell by an unidentified interstellar hitchhiker.

"It is possible, sir," Spock answered, oblivious to McCoy's darkening mood. "It is also possible that it is an escape pod from a recent wreck or other catastrophe."

Jim considered that. "Uhura, get in touch with Starfleet. See if they have any reports of accidents or distress signals from the area."

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. Sulu, can we get a visual?"

"I can try, sir." Sulu's nimble fingers flew over the console. "Visual acquired, sir." A moment later, the enormous screen in front of them blossomed with an image of the cosmos that surrounded their ship. An endless expanse of eternal night dotted with pinpricks of light brilliant as polished diamonds. The stars in all their splendor, their light so pure they made his eyes water. Heaven, the dreamers would have called it, and so would his mother, come to think of it. The scientist in him knew better, of course, knew the less glamorous truth of space dust and gases and nuclear fission, but there was a small, tenacious part of him, a part born and raised with pan-fried chicken and his mother's singing on Sunday mornings, that secretly wondered if the dreamers might be right.

And in the middle of the silent, yawning vastness, a speck of silver barely visible to the naked eye.

"Magnify times twenty," Jim ordered.

Sulu complied, and the image narrowed and sharpened. Stars blinked out as the silver speck swelled and swallowed them whole. Jim sat forward and then rose, and he and Spock moved closer to the screen for a better look.

 _I can't beat 'em, so I might as well join them,_ McCoy thought with grim fatalism, and followed suit.

"If it's an escape pod, it's a small one," Jim observed.

"I don't think it's an escape pod," McCoy said suddenly, mouth dry. "It looks like another damn cryotube."

The atmosphere on the bridge instantly shifted from one of curiosity to bristling wariness.

"Shields up. Sulu, can you tell me anything else about whoever's in that cryotube?" Jim demanded. His shoulders were high and tight, and his hands curled into tight fists at his sides.

Sulu peered at the sensor readouts. "Readings indicate that it is human, sir."

McCoy's stomach tightened. _I'll be damned. Marcus missed one._

Jim's thoughts must have mirrored his own, because he said, "Can you tell if the occupant has undergone any genetic modification?"

Sulu shook his head. "Negative, sir. That's beyond the sensor's capabilities."

"I'd need to examine them," McCoy murmured.

"Captain," Uhura called from her post, "Starfleet has no record of any incidents in this area."

Spock spun sharply on his heel. "Sir, I recommend that we leave this cryotube where it is."

"We can't just leave it here," McCoy protested. 

"We very well can, and we should. The last time we encountered people in cryotubes, this ship and Starfleet command were nearly destroyed. We and the Federation have only recently recovered, and a second attack at this juncture would prove catastrophic. The prudent course of action is to leave this cryotube and its occupant to its fate."

"What if it's not one of Khan's people? What if it's just some poor fool that got jettisoned with the garbage by mistake?"

Spock arched an eyebrow at him. "A highly unlikely scenario, Doctor," he replied, and though McCoy could not disagree, his imperious tone still rankled. "As Lt. Uhura has pointed out, there is no record of any vessels in the area. As such, there is no logical explanation for a human presence here."

"Logical or not, there's a human being out there," he snapped, and gestured at the screen with one outstretched arm. "And they're alive. And you're suggesting that we should just leave them there."

"It may be an ambush," Spock persisted with maddening pragmatism.

"A one-man ambush in the middle of nowhere," McCoy challenged. "Come on, man, think."

"I am thinking, Doctor. It is not outside the realm of possibility that Khan would employ such a strategy. Admiral Marcus used a similar one to smuggle Khan's people aboard. Khan is smart and dangerous; he may well have decided to attack the ship by perverting tactics once used against him. If we bring the cryotube aboard, the ship could be compromised from within."

"And if it's not Khan?"

"An acceptable loss. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

"'An acceptable loss?'" he repeated incredulously, and snorted disdainfully. "Of course it is. It's just a number on some tote board in your calculating Vulcan brain. I suppose I shouldn't expect anything different from someone who abandoned a man on a frozen wasteland without so much as a backward glance."

"I did what I thought best," Spock said primly, but McCoy knew he had struck a nerve by the way his back stiffened.

"And we see how well that went. If Jim hadn't managed to pirate his way back on board, we'd all be space dust at the ruined edge of the galaxy."

"I see no benefit in revisiting past errors. It achieves nothing, and it has no bearing on our current situation."

McCoy grit his teeth and fought the juvenile urge to cuff him upside his insufferable head. Instead, he dismissed him with a roll of his eyes and a shake of his head, and turned to Jim, who had been watching their exchange with wry amusement.

"For God's sake, Jim, we can't just pretend we didn't see it. Even if this is one of Khan's people, they deserve the same chance as the others. Bring it in and let me examine it. If it is one of Khan's people, we close it without waking them up and send it on to Seti Alpha 5."

"And if it's hiding a photon bomb or other destructive device?" Spock interjected.

Jim turned to Sulu, hands clasped loosely behind his back in unconscious imitation of his science officer. "Mr. Sulu, are there any readings from that cryotube that would indicate weaponry?"

Sulu glanced at his console. "Negative, Captain. All readings show that it's just a cryotube with a single life form inside."

"Jim-"

"Captain-"

Jim thought, head bowed, and then he said, "Mr. Sulu, engage tractor beams. Uhura, have a security team meet us in Transporter Room Two. Spock, Bones, you're with me."

Bones nodded. Spock scowled, but said nothing. On the screen, the tractor bean extended its quicksilver tendrils to envelop the small capsule. Jim watched it drift toward the screen and the unseen belly of the ship for a few moments, and then he turned and strode toward the door. He and Spock trailed dutifully in his wake.

"Captain," Spock began as soon as the bridge doors had slid shut behind them, "I feel it is my duty as the ship's First Officer to object to this course of action."

"Noted," came Jim's reply as they made their way to the turbolift.

"Captain, I do not believe you appreciate the severity of potential consequences should my hypothesis prove correct," Spock said officiously.

"Your harebrained theory, you mean," McCoy needled.

"My hypothesis is based on sound logical principles, whereas yours is based strictly on admirable but misguided emotional impulse."

"Excuse me for having a little damn empathy."

"Let us hope it does not prove fatal."

"Why, you-"

"Gentlemen," Jim interrupted before McCoy could offer his opinion on Spock's constitution, "let's see what we're dealing with before we start claiming told-you-so trophies." He smirked and stepped into the turbolift.

"Smug, cold-blooded..." McCoy muttered under his breath.

The security team was waiting outside the transporter room when they arrived, four strapping lads with phasers at the hip and faces devoid of all expression. Recruited by the Starfleet posters plastered in every club and dive bar on the planet, no doubt, wooed by the promise of steady pay and a life of adventure in the unexplored wilds beyond the stars. He wondered how many of them had believed it. More than a few, he guessed. Booze had a way of polishing even the grimmest of turds, and even if you were sober enough to see through the bullshit, sometimes desperation left you no choice.

God knew he had been desperate when he had seen the poster dangling forlornly on the wall of some Atlanta dive, yellowed by finger grease and sweat and the booze sweated from countless pores as patrons listed and wobbled to the bathroom on legs gone to tallow and rubber. He had been newly-divorced and destitute, down to his last credit and taking up space on the barstool because he had nowhere to go. The bartender had had more pity than Spock, thank God, had let him stay as long as he pretended to nurse his watered-down shot of Kentucky bourbon, and he had sat there with all his ex-wife and the judge had left him shoved into a duffel at his feet. The poster had caught his bleary, wall-eyed attention only because he had been tired of studying the grain of the synthetic wood of the bar and the deceptively-cheerful glint of the ersatz crystal decanters that lined the shelves behind the barkeep's head.

He had recognized its glossy pictures and bold proclamations as bullshit immediately; he wasn't so crocked that he could not recognize that piquant, distinctive, earthy reek when he got a snootful, but according to a dispassionate judge with a soft Dixie drawl, hangdog jowls, and dead eyes, heaping helpings of shit were all he had to look forward to, at least until the former Mrs. Dr. McCoy became someone else's problem. So he had let his gaze linger on its crisp picture of a beaming, young cadet in a smart, maroon uniform. No military expeditions, the poster had promised, only exploration and inquiry, and, with luck and diplomacy and the winning nature of humans, friendship with other species.

Bunkum, of course. Despite their sudden pretensions to moral respectability in the wake of global nuclear annihilation, humans had an unparalleled knack for wearing out their welcome almost as soon as they stuck their foot in the door. He had thought, as he'd blinked at the poster and clutched his empty tumbler, that when the first humans turned up on their galactic neighbors' doorstep dressed in the Sunday best and with the snuffling, dumb enthusiasm of poorly-trained golden retrievers, the neighbors were likely to extend the cold barrel of a blaster in lieu of hospitality. And, truth be told, he could not fault them for it.

Not the place for him, he had told himself decisively as his dry lips had tried in vain to coax a few last drops of bourbon from his stingy glass. He would have to fly, for one thing, and in a spaceship, no less, and he had not gone to med school just to end up mingled with hull fragments and a still-sizzling warp drive on some godforsaken asteroid. 

Prudent advice, especially from a mind busily unraveling several sheets to the wind, and he had congratulated himself on his levelheadedness. And yet, part of him had wanted to believe, to take the poster at its word and hope that mankind's first forays into space would change things for the better, would usher in a new dawn of peace, advancement, and prosperity. It was the same hopeful voice that had talked him into medical school with the argument that his steady, farm boy's hands could stitch the broken back together again. 

_It also told you that marrying Pamela was a good idea,_ another, more dour voice had noted. _And look how well_ that _turned out._

He had grunted in taciturn concession of the point and turned the chilled glass in his fingers. His wife was gone, as gone as the house and car and most of the credits in their joint account. Gone as the fledgling practice that had just begun to flourish. All she had left him with was his name, and he had suspected that was only because she had had no further use for it anymore. He was not sure he did, truth be told. After his joyful experience with family law, it would not even buy him a pot to piss in, let alone a shabby window to throw it out of.

But for all that, he had not enlisted that night. The bourbon in his belly had fed the guttering fires of his pride, and that naive, hopeful voice had persisted. Instead, he had nodded his thanks to the barman, shouldered his bulging duffel, and taken the car that was soon to be hers for one last ride. But it had proven as fickle and treacherous as his ex, had kicked up its heels and quit in a spume of dust and smoke on the hardpan of the sprawling Mojave. He had cursed his luck and kicked the tires, and then he had hitchhiked into Vegas, duffel hanging dispiritedly from one dusty shoulder. 

He had hoped to find work there, but there had been scant call for a green doctor with dust behind his ears. He had tried to catch on with the clinics, had offered his services as a traveling medic willing to rumble all over Hell's half-acre to attend patients too old and too stubborn to tear up the roots their bones had put down so long ago, but they had wanted someone more experienced and so had the patients, who had taken one look at him and seen only his youth and his haggard face.

 _I'm sure you're a fine doctor, son,_ they'd croaked at him with their thin, sand-scoured voices. _But I'm afraid I can't have someone so damn fatalistic tinkering with my insides._

So that had been the end of that, and he had found himself at loose ends, idle for the first time in his life. He had found piecework here and there, swabbing clinic floors or filling in for sick orderlies, and slept more often than not in the glorified doss houses the Federation had established to help the downtrodden avoid the taste of shoe leather on their tongues, but nothing steady, nothing that brought him peace or satisfaction. To make matters worse(as if they could have been back then, with sand in every unmentionable crevice and the dry, desert air stale as plaque in his mouth), he had begun to fear that his mind would forget its knowledge of the body's various systems and devote itself instead to the remembrance of whiskeys and bitters and cocktails and the nigh-innumerable permutations of black-market rotgut. His restless hands had wanted for the balanced heft of a laser scalpel in his, or a bioscanner, or a hypo.

And so it was that he had found himself staring at that same recruitment poster again, outside the communal living house he had called home this time. The same grinning cadet, the same lurid photos. The same lies draped in the glory of promise. Everything had been the same except him. He had been numb and dispirited and hungry for who he had been before the courts and unkind circumstance had chewed him up and spat him out.

He had still smelled bullshit, but it had no longer been so offensive to his nostrils, and one summer morning, he had presented himself at the recruitment center. It had been a casino once, or so the story went, but that had been centuries ago, before most of the old ways had been obliterated in the searing blast-furnace of nuclear holocaust. By the time he had found it, footsore and thirsty and with sweat trickling down his armpits and prickling in his scalp, it had been a recruitment center and outlying administration archive for the Federation, its formerly grand and sprawling expanse partitioned into a warren of offices and cubicles and filing rooms crammed with database servers and records terminals.

He still remembered the recruiter to whom he had signed away what remained of his life. A once-solid man slowly going soft, with a jovial smile that had not matched the cool assessment in his gaze. _You don't look like much,_ those eyes had said as his hand had pumped his arm in a hearty handshake and his mouth had launched into a spiel polished smooth by thousands of passes through his pale, dry lips.

 _Need more iron in your diet,_ he had thought as the man had droned on, but he had had the sense to keep it to himself and take the seat the man had offered with that shit-eating grin and a sweep of his arm.

He remembered the man, but he could recall nothing of the promises made. More bullshit, he supposed, offered to him on a padd passed over the desk, dry bread offered to the grasping, outstretched hand of a man too proud to beg. Nor could he recall what he had told the man in turn. As little as he could manage, if he had to guess. His past was all he had had left by then, and he had been damned if he would lose that, too. A man should be allowed his regrets.

 _A doctor, huh?_ the man had said, and leaned back in his chair until the back groaned in protest. _Well, we sure could use your type. Most of the kids we get in here are delinquents and snotnosed punks who think they're gonna play space marine or be the next Ferdinand Magellan. We'll need somebody to patch their fool heads up when their bravado outweighs their brains._

A life went pretty cheaply, as it turned out. He had traded three years for a disingenuous handshake and a pass for the next transport to the Starfleet Academy, and three days later, he had found himself strapped into a shuttle next to some cocksure cowboy named James T. Kirk and clutching his hip flask in a white-knuckled grip, its contents burning a slow trail to his panic-knotted belly.

 _How many of these kids are here because of those same tired promises?_ he wondered as he glanced at the stern, impossibly young faces of the security detail. More than a few, like as not. Some of them might have been snared by the same recruiter as him, that fisher of men with the dead eyes and the predatory smile. Or maybe they had been snagged by their own Captain Pikes, guilted into it by men with lofty ideals or by the ghost in the family tree, the celebrated hero who died on some sunless rock before they ever coughed the amniotic fluid from their lungs.

Or maybe they were fellow runaways, embittered by life's disappointments and looking for a fresh start. Maybe they were fleeing broken homes or dodging the slings and arrows of unwanted responsibility, cowardly Romeos who had loved naive Juliets and bowed out when they began to talk of curtains and baby bonnets. He had known a few of both during his Academy days; the former inspired pity, but for the latter, he could muster only dull contempt.

 _Let's just hope they know how to work those phasers they're packing,_ he thought.

The team fell in behind them as they entered Transporter Room Two. Chekov stood at the ready behind the controls. "Transporter standing by, Captain," he announced with wide-eyed earnestness, a pup eager to perform his best trick.

"Energize," Jim ordered.

"Aye, Captain." 

A tap of the console, and the cryotube appeared in a whirl of orange light, insubstantial as mist at first, but soon resolving into a solid cylinder of silver titanium with a registry number on the side in small, black letters.

"Captain, I do not recognize the registry number as any configuration currently employed by the Federation," Spock said.

"Have your phasers at the ready, gentlemen," Jim commanded. He drew his own phaser, and from behind them came the furtive rustle of the security team following suit.

They approached cautiously, knees bent and arms outthrust, phasers trained on the hatch. McCoy strained to hear any sign of movement from the cryotube, but it was silent as the tomb, and just as still. Spock, phaser still at the ready in one hand, produced his tricorder and scanned the cryotube.

"Anything I should worry about?" Jim asked.

"All readings suggest it is what it appears to be," Spock answered.

"So it might not be Khan's. His had those anomalous readings that Miss Marcus detected."

"Yes, but those were caused by the photon torpedoes Admiral Marcus loaded inside the cryotubes. Khan might have devised a weapon undetectable by our current technology."

"There's a happy thought," McCoy muttered, and tightened his grip on his phaser.

"Can you see anything, Bones?" Jim asked as McCoy approached the cryotube.

"Negative. There's too much smoke from the cooling agent. I won't know exactly what we're dealing with until we open her up."

"Then that's what we'll do." Jim motioned for two of the security officers to lift the cryotube from the transporter pad. "Take it to sickbay and set up a containment field around it. Khan or not, there's no guarantee that whoever's in there won't be hostile. The rest of you keep those phasers at the ready."

The security officers designated as pack mules led the procession from the transporter room, pallbearers at a shorthanded funeral. The rest of them trailed behind, phasers held in slackening grips. Passing crewmen turned to watch their progress with avid, curious gazes and whispered to one another. McCoy knew what the topic of conversation would be in the bar and on the promenade of shops on Deck Twenty-Three. The mysterious retinue creeping from the transporter room would take on a lurid life of its own, grow to mythic proportions as it passed from deckhand to engineering crew to shuttle maintenance. A cryotube would become a smuggling operation or a prototype weapon designed to obliterate entire planets with a single anti-matter pulse. and its occupant would find themselves reborn as either a god among mortals or an abomination from the abyss. He would place a gag order on his staff, but he had no illusions about its effectiveness. Good intentions were no match for the need to gossip, to share forbidden knowledge passed from lips stained with wine. If it weren't the nurses, who gathered for drinks and shopping at the promenade at least once a week, it would be the aides, who enlivened the tedium and ignominy of hosing off medical bays and emptying urinals and bedpans with rounds of drinks and late-night poker games.

"This is going to spread like wildfire, you know," he grunted as he kept pace with Jim and Spock. The security officers and their cargo had pulled ahead, spurred by their orders to set up a containment field.

"Let them talk," came the cavalier reply, and McCoy had bitten back a sigh and quashed the urge to roll his eyes.

"The doctor has a point, Captain," Spock pointed out.

"Well, I'm glad you think so."

Spock ignored him. "Rumor allowed to go unchecked could promote an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, especially coming so closely on the heels of our encounter with Khan."

"Relax, Spock," Jim said dismissively. "The crew are Starfleet officers, and I'm sure they'll respond professionally."

"Given my experience, that is not necessarily the case," Spock retorted drily, and McCoy felt a pang of grudging admiration.

Jim only grinned. "Fair point, Mr. Spock," he conceded. "But right now, we have nothing to report. When we do, I'll be sure to disseminate all pertinent information to the crew."

McCoy gave a dubious grunt. Spock's lips puckered in a skeptical moue. Jim merely grinned sedately at them.

 _I'm following a lunatic,_ he thought morosely.

The cryotube had been set on a table by the time they entered sickbay, and McCoy noted with absolutely no surprise that all other activity had ceased. The orderlies and med techs were clustered around the empty beds, eyeing the cryotube with avid, uneasy curiosity. 

_Thank God no one was in need of actual medical attention in here,_ he thought irritably, but before he could rebuke his gawking staff, Jim spoke.

"Is the containment field ready?" he asked the nearest security officer, a kid who could not be more than twenty-four, and who sported a sparse down of peachfuzz on his pale, rounded chin.

"Aye, sir."

Jim opened his mouth to speak again, but McCoy cut him off. "The only person going inside that field is me." When Jim made to protest, he set his neck and overrode him. "That's the way it's going to be. You're the captain, but this is my sickbay. You can stand there with your phasers if you want to, but everyone else clears the room."

Jim studied him for a moment, searching for a chink in his resolve. When he found none, he said, "Everyone but Spock clear the room immediately."

For a disappointed, bewildered instant, no one moved. Then, the gaggles of onlookers dissolved, and they left the room on shuffling, reluctant feet. The security team were the last to depart, holstering phasers as they went, and the last cast a lingering look at the cryotube, as though he were waiting for its occupant to burst forth in a shower of Plexiglas and liquid nitrogen. 

McCoy shared his unease, for what little it was worth, but there was nothing to be done for it now. Sensor readings indicated that there was a human being in there, and he would be damned if he would just leave them in there like a can of peach preserves forgotten in someone's root cellar. He was not some green-blooded Vulcan who could reduce lives to a bloodless calculation of cost and benefit to a greater good that had an alarming way of shrinking to the unenviable lesser for those at the bottom. He was a doctor, and a good one last he checked, and he intended to act like one.

He rolled a tray of scanners and hypos alongside the table. "Turn on the containment field," he said when he had taken up his position beside the cryotube.

Spock moved to the wall beside the dispensary and tapped several commands into the wall-mounted security and environmental controls. "Containment field activated."

"Activate the pathogen filter while you're at it. It's a longshot, but I don't want this whole ship infected if our guest turns out to be carrying some pox or flu."

"Pathogen filters engaged."

Though curiosity burned within him, a low, hot coal low in his belly and lodged behind his breastbone like a bone spur, he proceeded with care and performed scan after scan on the container. This close, the results were more accurate. The guest in the cryotube was, indeed, a human. It was also a woman. There was no sign of infection, contagion, or significant injury, and yet, a few of the readings showed neuromuscular and skeletal abnormalities. His brow furrowed in concentration, and he adjusted its sensitivity in an effort to compensate for interference from the cryotube.

"You got something, Bones?" Jim drew closer, though he stayed outside the containment area.

"I don't know," he murmured, more to himself than in answer to his question. The anomalous readings were increasing. Nothing extreme; just a handful of results that whispered of flesh and bone but uneasily acquainted. Dislocations, but not quite. Joints and bones set in a torsion the human body did not gracefully abide.

_It could still be interference from the cryotube, some sort of radiological distortion caused by the life-support and cooling systems._

_Maybe,_ agreed a thoughtful, analytical voice, the voice of dissertations and long study session in the university library, when most of the other students had drifted off to the friendlier haunts of their dorm rooms and he was left with the silence and the solitude and the watery, flickering glow of handheld tablets. _But none of your stasis pods cause such anomalies. Granted, this is an older model--a lot older, in fact--but that should make the readings more accurate, not less. The newer scanners have been programmed to counteract outside interference._

 _I don't think it is interference,_ he thought as he conducted another skin. _There's something wrong with the person inside. It might not be infectious or dangerous, but it's abnormal._

He set his scanner on the nearby tray. "I'm opening the hatch," he announced. He reached out and pulled out and down to release the latch.

A billow of cold, white smoke billowed from the opening, and as the last of it coiled and shifted around the occupant, a restless, white serpent sloughing its skin, he caught a glimpse of crimped, plastic tubing and the thinner line of a nasogastric tube.

 _Forget old, this is positively ancient,_ he marveled as he waved away the clinging, white smoke and saw the oxygen mask that covered her mouth and nose. Translucent tape had been placed over her eyes, and there was more on the backs on her hands to secure intravenous lines. Another line snaked beneath a thin, green shift and disappeared between her thin legs.

 _Catheter,_ he catalogued with clinical detachment as he examined her.

"It's not one of Khan's," he said distractedly, absorbed in his study of the small form in front of him.

"You're sure?" Jim asked.

"Absolutely. You can turn off the containment shield. She poses no threat."

"Doctor, you cannot be sure of her abilities or her motives at the present time." Spock's voice, dry and droning. He had not moved from his place beside the environmental controls. "I would advise you to proceed with the utmost caution."

"I can't speak to her motives, that's true," he conceded. "But I can tell you that she is physically incapable of posing a threat. She might want to, but it won't matter. Now, turn off the damn containment field."

Spock complied, and then he and Jim promptly moved forward to crowd the table.

"Fascinating," Spock observed as he peered down at the woman in the cryotube.

McCoy did not disagree. She was small and pale and fragile, with slender bones and dainty features. The stuff of fairy tales, or, she would have been, were it not for thinness of her arms and legs and the queer, cockeyed splay of her hands where they rested on her belly. Her legs were coated with fine, downy wisps of blonde hair, and one knee was markedly higher than the other. Her right leg lolled bonelessly toward the left, and when he reached out and gently shifted her patella into a more natural position, there was substantial resistance from the surrounding tissues and ligaments.

 _That is its natural position,_ he realized. He released the patella, and it promptly reclaimed its former place. He performed the same test on the other kneecap. This one, too, shifted, but it was stiffer and more centered than its counterpart.

Further examination revealed minor edema of flat feet devoid of arches and possessed of small, discolored toes that fanned and curled. He probed a sole with his fingers. Cold. Cold and purple and fragile. He could feel the tiny, impossibly-thin bones beneath the frigid skin, little more than eggshells. If he closed his hand around them, he could shatter them with a squeeze.

"Is that normal?" Jim eyed her swollen, purple feet.

"No."

"What causes it?"

"Poor circulation. As to what causes that, I'm not sure yet. Could be positional. Preliminary scans don't show any heart defects or venal blockages." He hummed as he gently probed the pitiful, atrophied muscles of her calves. "Her legs are cold, too, though not as bad as the feet. The temperature normalizes once you get past the knees." Her small belly was soft and warm under his palpating hands. He picked up one of her hands and examined the nail beds. They were not as pink as he would have liked, but neither were they the mottled eggplant of her feet.

He pulled down her lower lip. "No signs of cyanosis." This close, he could see wisps of blonde hair peeking from the tight skullcap that adorned her head, fine and bright as gold in the light of the examination table. Her taped eyelids fluttered.

 _She's dreaming,_ he thought as he tracked the rapid movement of her eyes behind their pale shutters. _Is it a good one?_ "I want to warm her up, bring her out of stasis."

"Doctor, I-" Spock began.

"She's not one of Khan's. If she was, he would have killed her." His assessing gaze traveled to her scrawny legs and discolored feet. "She's hardly representative of his superior ideals."

"He could have exiled her," Spock theorized.

"No," Jim said quietly. "He has compassion for his people, but only if they meet his ideal. If she was his, he would have killed her with a twist of his wrist."

"Thank you." McCoy tossed his bioscanner onto the tray. "Jim, I want to bring her up."

"All right, but the pathogen filter stays up until her blood analyses come back."

"Certainly," he agreed, surprised at his usually reckless captain's uncharacteristic paroxysm of prudence. "I'm going to need a few nurses."

"I'll summon the nurses," Jim said. "Keep me posted on any changes to her condition?"

"You can count on it," he murmured, mind on information displayed by the various monitors.

Bringing someone out of cryogenic stasis was no small matter of flipping a switch until the blood thawed. It was a complex, painstaking process, and even with the assistance of Mr. Spock, who had stayed to observe and report, and three nurses, it was nearly an hour before the woman was removed from the cryotube and placed on the open bed nearest his desk. The various monitors sprang to life as she was carefully arranged and covered with a thermal blanket to hasten warming, and they showed a strong heartbeat and blood oxygenation levels better than he expected. Her feet, however, remained a deep, mottled purple. His hands itched to chafe them until warmth and the flush of blood flowed into them.

 _The last time you saw that color, it was in the fetal pigs you dissected in first-year anatomy,_ a conversational voice in his head reminded him. _You'd seen examples of it in the slides and holographic projections in your anatomy and physio classes, but those were historical cases showcasing diseases that had not been seen in two centuries. Heart attacks and diabetic neuropathy and cystic fibrosis and pleurisy. Lung cancer and fatal asthma attacks The most recent cases had been from berylium miners in Santiago, Chile, who had suffered crush injuries and compartment syndrome._

_That's not a color meant for healthy, living tissue, not in humans, anyway. That's the color of dead and broken and dying. Yet none of your tests can account for it. You could find something on more specific scans and tests or in the blood tests and urinalysis, but so far, you've got squat. There's some sediment in the kidneys, but that's nothing a course of Certaxalin-12 can't fix, and it certainly wouldn't contribute to the poor circulation in her feet. Lungs and heart are clear, though the former show signs of collapse, and there's a pinprick scar between her breasts that's either a track scar or a memento from a chest tube insertion. No constrictions, no clots, no signs of previous injury. All the same, those feet are cold and blue as a dead pig preserved in formaldehyde and offered up to the scrutiny of med students who were more butcher than surgeons. and who spent the bulk of that week smuggling pig parts out of the labs and into the dormitories and commissaries for use in an ever-escalating prank war that ended with pig scrotums in the olive bar and a minute, hairless, sow's ear tucked inside your pillowcase until the rank, putrefying stench of it drove you out of your bunk in the middle of the night to scour the room from top to bottom. Your roommate, of course, laughed his ass off, propped on his elbow and watching you check beneath your desk with your boxered ass in the air and your nose curled against the oily, porkfat reek._

_He put it there, the grinning, guffawing bastard, though you didn't figure that out until the end of term, when, bags packed, he sauntered up, clapped you on the shoulder, and leaned in to whisper,_ Hope you enjoyed the pork rind I left under your pillow for you, Len, _his warm breath cinnamon and clove against your ear. You could cheerfully have punched him then, but you had the increasingly rare sense to think before you act, and you didn't want the resultant disciplinary action on your record, so you kept your hands behind your back and grunted a noncommittal reply, and he grinned stupidly at you and walked out of your life forever. Your paths diverged after that, and the last you heard, he was a much-sought after cardiologist in Phoenix._

Phoenix was light-years and a lifetime away, and wearing out the dusty trails of his memory lane got him no closer to the mystery of those maddening purple feet.

"They are most curious," a voice said from over his left shoulder, and he turned to see that Spock's eyes, too, were on her feet. "I gather that you have yet to discover the cause." 

His only response was a shake of the head.

"And what of her other anomalies--the skewed limbs and length disparity between her legs?"

"Not sure. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was congenital. The warped bone structure certainly suggests it's a condition of long standing, and the fragility of her feet and lower limbs tell me they're not accustomed to bearing weight."

"But the last known congenital defect-,"

"Was recorded in 2109," he finished. "I remember my medical history, thank you." He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. "I didn't say it made sense."

Spock cocked his head thoughtfully. "The cryotube in which she was discovered is of older design. It is old enough to date from the early 21st century. Perhaps its registry number will yield more information."

"Do Federation records go back that far?"

"If the date of its manufacture occurred before 2161, then our best hope lies in the historical archives."

Before he could reply, the woman on the bed moaned, a low, glottal rush of breath that brought him out of his chair and to her bedside, scanner in hand. Another, louder moan, and her leg twitched spasmodically.

"She's coming out of the anesthesia." He swore as her arms began to twitch uncontrollably. 

"Is she in seizure, Doctor?" Spock stood at the foot of the bed, face impassive as he watched the woman spasm and flail.

McCoy performed a scan, one hand braced on her chest to keep her from tumbling to the floor. "Not according to the scan, but it's like the neurological impulses are scrambled. They're leaving her nerves in the proper sequence, but by the time they reach her brain, they're either scrambled or abruptly terminated. Her body knows it's supposed to do something, but it's not sure what." He swore afresh as she was wracked with a particularly savage spasm that bowed her spine, pulled her lips from her teeth, and drew her arms to her chest. She opened her mouth, drew in a sucking breath, and released it in a thin, keening sob.

_She's aware enough to be afraid._

"It's all right. My name is Dr. Leonard McCoy, and you're all right," he soothed, as he had once soothed the skittish horses on his parents' farm.

The thrashing beneath his restraining hand eased, but did not cease. Beneath his palm, her chest rose and fell with panicky rapidity, and the muscles of her sternum fluttered with the promise of another cramp. He did not need the shrill, alarmed beeping of the cardiac monitor to tell him that her heartbeat was much too fast; he could feel its muffled pounding beneath his hand, a sparrow battering itself against the bars of its strangling cage. Tears seeped from beneath eyelids still held shut by tape, and low, frightened cries escaped dry, cracked lips.

"You're all right," he repeated. "I'm going to take the tape off your eyes now." He set the scanner aside and let his fingertips brush the corner of her eye. "Just me," he promised when she tensed and shied. "Just my fingers. Deep breaths. You're hyperventilating."

Bless her, but she tried to obey. She took a deep, ragged breath and tried to expel it slowly through her nose, but it emerged in a single, plosive gust against his throat and chin.

 _Points for effort_. "Again," he ordered. "Try it a little slower." He pinced the edge of the tape between his thumb and forefinger and peeled it back by painstaking degrees.

Her second attempt was better. Beneath his palm, her heartbeat had begun to slow, but her muscles still twitched restlessly.

"Relax." He slipped the tape from her eye. "Relax."

"I c'n." It was a squeaking rasp, as though her throat had been scoured with sand.

"What?"

She swallowed convulsively. "I said, 'I can't," she repeated, frightened and laryngeal. Her arms contracted against her chest, hands fisted so tightly that the short-cropped crescents of her nails bit into the pink flesh of her palms.

He fought the urge to pry her hands open. Instead, he focused on removing the other piece of tape. When it was done, he straightened, but kept his hand on her chest. "It's gone," he said. "You can open your eyes."

She stilled so suddenly beneath his hand that he thought she had lost consciousness, but then her eyelids had fluttered open to reveal watery blue eyes rimed with grit and dried mucous. She squinted against the sudden brightness and relaxed one fisted hand to rub her eyes.

"It'll take a while to adjust," he said, and drew up a wheeled stool. "I'm Dr. McCoy." He sat with prim, practiced efficiency, knees pointed outward.

She blinked owlishly at him. "Dr. McCoy." Soft and slurred, as though anesthesia had not yet relinquished its hold. "Rosalie Walker." Her hands had relaxed and splayed awkwardly on her sheeted belly. "So does this mean you fixed it, then?"

"Fixed what?"

"My CP. That's the reason you and my parents stuffed me into that tin can."

"CP?" he said blankly.

"Moderate quadriplegic spastic cerebral palsy," she said slowly, as though he were a possibly dangerous simpleton. The tension, which had begun to ebb from her, returned. Her hands curled into fists yet again and crept toward her chest. "I'm going to take that as a no," she said in a tremulous, brittle voice.

"CP," he muttered in soft incredulity. "My God..."

_There hasn't been a case of CP since 2109. Not since such defects were eradicated through microneurosurgery shortly after delivery. That last sufferer died in 2179, and they dropped its management and treatment options from mainstream med school curriculum in 2202. As far as the medical establishment is concerned, it's a dead impairment, a relic of the past relegated to medical history classes and medical museums where they display the mummified remains of conjoined twins, the silicone breast implants women used to shoehorn into their bodies in the name of vanity, and the clunky, primitive braces worn by polio survivors in the 1950s and 60s._

_Have to be careful now,_ he told himself as he leaned forward and braced his elbows on his quadriceps. _If this goes bad, I'll have to sedate her again, and that's the last thing she needs._

"Rosalie, do you know what the date is?"

She snorted. "No. How could I? I've been stuffed inside that tin can for God knows how long." She narrowed her eyes. "How long have I been making like the world's oldest cup of soup?"

"Do you remember the day you went in?"

She nodded. "November 28, 2020."

 _2020? Jesus, she's been in stasis more than two hundred years._ He leaned forward on the stool, mouth dry and stomach hollow. "Well, Miss Walker, I hate to tell you this, but today is April 27, 2260."

She stared at him in mute stupefaction. "Right," she said flatly.

Spock spoke suddenly from the foot of the bed. "Dr. McCoy is quite correct."

She startled at the sound of his voice, fisted hands tightening and bony knees drawing up beneath the blankets. She turned her groggy gaze on him. "Huh. "Elves are real," she said conversationally, and promptly vomited over the side of the bed.

"Well, that could've gone worse," McCoy grunted prosaically as he scooted away from the splatter of watery bile.

"Shall I summon the captain?" Spock asked, unfazed by the mess or the acidic, rotten-orange stink of regurgitated digestive juices.

McCoy nodded. On the bed, Rosalie slumped against the pillows, dispirited and bedraggled. Strings of bile clung to the ends of her hair like strands of spidersilk.

"Sorry," she croaked meekly, dry-lipped and panting.

"It's to be expected," he answered. "You're in for a rough day or so, I'm afraid. Everything in your body when you went under is going to be looking for a way out."

A mirthless titter. "Fabulous," she croaked drily.

It was anything but, and when the spasms seized her again and turned her guts inside out, he had a sick bowl at the ready.

Spock watched it all, seemingly indifferent to her tortured gasps and the wet, strangled sounds of retching, and together, they awaited the arrival of the captain.


	2. Rude Awakening

Her first memories of life in the twenty-third century were hazy and inextricably bound with the sickly-sweet taste of bile. It was not wholly unfamiliar; the sheets draped over her legs were thin and comfortless, and the shiny, steel basin held beneath her gaping mouth was unmistakably a sick bowl. It smelled familiar, too, like disinfectant and cotton batting and talcum powder dusted over latex gloves.

And Christ almighty, did it feel the same. Nearly three hundred years had done nothing to ease the low ache in the small of her back or the rigid spasticity in her arms and legs. Her legs trembled and juddered convulsively when she stretched them beneath the sheets, and when nausea gripped her guts in a greasy fist, they contracted painfully toward her lopsided pelvis. She swore feebly behind her clenched teeth and spat a gobbet of watery acidic bile into the basin.

"Spasticity?" said a gruff voice at her right ear. "I have something for that."

 _You were supposed to fix this,_ she wanted to shout, but her indignation was swamped by another wave of vomit that emerged from her churning gut with a ratcheting splash. Another spasm, and another contraction that splayed her feet and curled her toes and drew her bony knees upward.

When the spasm subsided, the hand holding the sick bowl set it on her lap. "Don't let that spill," the voice admonished, though there was no heat in it, and the hand disappeared from view. The soft scuffle of footsteps was followed by the scrape and jangle of someone sifting through the contents of a drawer. The footsteps returned. Something cold and metallic touched her neck, and she recoiled. The bowl yawed wildly, and the contents threatened to slosh over the sides and spill onto the sheets. 

A gloved hand shot out to steady the bowl. "Dammit, I told you not to spill that," groused the voice. Then, more softly. "It's all right. It's just a hypo." Cold metal skimmed the sensitive flesh of her pulsepoint again, and again, she retreated. Hard experience had taught her that most doctors were filthy liars when it came to the effects of their arcane arts upon her ramshackle body. They also lied like hell about how much something was going to hurt.

"No," she tried to protest, but bile and vomit had clogged her throat and rendered her tongue sticky and clumsy inside a mouth far out of practice when it came to speech, and all that emerged was a petulant, unintelligible grunt.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said the voice. The gloved hand persisted, and a moment later, the cool steel found its mark. She braced for the burning pinch of a needle, her hands upraised and fisted spasmodically on either side of her face, but it never came. Instead, there was a brief thump, as though someone had flicked her throat. She let out a ragged, hitching breath and slowly lowered her hands. 

"Give that a minute," the voice instructed.

 _McCoy,_ her mind supplied helpfully. _His name is Dr. McCoy._

No liar, he, the good Doctor McCoy. No sooner had he spoken than her taut muscles had gone slack. Warmth flooded her extremities, and her fingertips, perpetually cold for want of circulation, tingled and grew pink. She blinked in amazement and wiggled fingers suddenly loose and malleable as fresh clay. Her knees dropped to the bed, the buckling span of a collapsing suspension bridge, and her adductors released with an audible creak. She uttered a bark of incredulous laughter and examined her hands as though she had never seen them before.

"Huh," she said admiringly. "What the hell did you _do_?" She flexed her fingers and wiggled her suddenly-limber legs beneath the bedclothes.

"I gave you a mild dose of Loxtan, a muscle relaxant," came the reply. "If you start feeling loopy or disoriented, or if you start having blurred vision, let me know. It's rare, but it happens."

"I hope it doesn't, because this is amazing." She waggled her fingers again.

"I'm glad you approve," he answered drily. "Now, would you mind holding your bowl? I'm a doctor, not a vomit concierge."

Another bark of incredulous laughter, and she turned to study him. He was younger than she expected, with dark brown hair and a full mouth set in unsmiling line. Piercing brown eyes met her inquisitive gaze, and a muscle twitched in his angular jaw.

 _He's studying me,_ she thought logily as her belly gurgled with the threat of renewed mutiny. _He's trying to figure out just what he's got._

In that, he was kin with his long-dead brethren in white, those doctors allegedly now moldering beneath the earth or gone to its welcoming embrace as so much dust in their funeral clothes. They had studied her, too, avid children clustered eagerly around a struggling rabbit trapped in a snare. They had poked and prodded and tested for baselines, had prescribed medications through trial and error and bid her decide the side effects with which she could best live. They had poked her with needles and pressed cold stethoscopes to her goosepimpled chest and shoved otioscopes into her ears as though the key to her twisted limbs and recalcitrant muscles lay in the wax-scummed canals of her ears. Neurologists and orthopedic specialists and physical and occupational therapists, each with their own pet theories and surefire regimens guaranteed to improve her "quality of life."

As if they had known anything of her life. They had been good and competent men all, and she had no doubt that they had been moved by a distant compassion, a desire to see her made comfortable in her incurable inferiority, but they had never known her, never cared to look beyond the clinical enumeration of diagnostic facts. She was not Rosalie Walker, daughter of Sherrilyn and George Walker, but Walker, Rosalie, female presenting with congenital moderate spastic quadriplegic Cerebral Palsy with secondary impairments, including amblyopia, myopia, hypertonia, and muscular atrophy. They had reduced her to the sum of her diagnosis and misaligned parts, and they had never peered behind her twitching, unruly limbs to discover the soul that lived within that untidy, ill-conceived frame. 

Far from improving her life, they had devoured it with their incessant rounds of rehab and occupational therapy. Time she could have spent reading in the sun or rolling through Centennial Olympic Park with the sun on her back had been squandered to the whims of physiotherapists who demanded she drag her unwilling legs from one end of the parallel bars to the other and do flailing, drunken leg lifts until her muscles screamed and sweat trickled into her asscrack, and to occupational therapists who insisted she play with toddlers' toys and crayons and fat pencils meant for smaller hands than hers in order to prove her intellectual mettle. While other teenage girls perfected the art of makeup application and engaged in awkward flirting at the mall food court, she became an intimate of chunky, square blocks meant for precise holes cut in wooden pegboards and imbued her fingers with the soapy smell of Crayolas. No lipstick and rouge for her, only graphite and wax and reams of paper marred by a circle she could never get quite right, a circle that wobbled and collapsed in on itself like a failing star. And while her crayons and pencils weaved over the paper, her overseers hummed and clucked and scribbled notes in files she was never permitted to read. She tossed beanbags into buckets and the gaping, toothless mouths of grinning clowns and sorted change to the cooing encouragement of people who patted themselves on the back and told themselves that they were nobly preparing this broken, unfortunate child for the job market. 

As a child, she had wanted to please them, to win their meaningless approval. As a teenager, she had despised them, begrudged them the time they wasted and the energy they pulled from her with their futile attempts to right the fundamental wrongs of her design with exercise and pills they made her slow and stupid and carried with them the unspoken risk of serious side effects. Who needed to fear kidney and liver disease from medication toxicity when your life expectancy was less than fifty years according to the wisdom of gods in white coats and green surgical scrubs that smelled of stale coffee and surreptitious cigarettes puffed in the handicapped stall? Best just to make her as presentable and inoffensive as possible until then, when she could be shut away in the family vault with due pomp and ceremony and promptly forgotten.

As an adult, she had pitied them for their smug condescension and their unwitting ignorance, and she had resented them for the inviolable sway they had held over her life long after liberty and the pursuit of happiness should have been hers. Her parents, God rest their souls, had loved her in their muddling, ineffectual way, but they had been blind devotees of the doctors, who had preened with their laurels and their walls full of accreditations and accolades, and their word was the writ of holy law. With a shake of their head or a stroke of their pen, the course of her life could be altered. Family vacations planned months in advance could be canceled in favor of another clinic visit or another round of inpatient therapy that came to nothing in the end. Save for the lost opportunity and a hefty bill, of course, the latter often arriving home before she did. Her parents spoke fondly of the Lord Jesus Christ, but her Almighty wore a surplice of medical-grade steel and spoke over her head through the muffling fabric of a surgical mask.

For all her seething resentment and acts of petty rebellion, like escaping to college on a full ride, it was the doctors who won in the end. They had dangled the tantalizing hope of a future cure before her parents like a sweetmeat before a starving child, and, dazzled by visions of a daughter with wedding rice in her hair instead of dribbling down the front of her shirt, they had merrily overridden her desperate, tearful protests and consigned her to the claustrophobic, astringent womb of the cryotube. She could still see her parents' faces in the seconds before the sedative had taken effect and plunged her headlong into smothering oblivion. Her father's had been bleak and pallid and impossibly aged as he had stared at her through the bleary, finger-smudged Lexan of small window. Her mother's face had been flushed with anguish and wet with tears, but hope had burned like madness in her raw, wet eyes, and she had known there would be no last-minute reprieve, no appeal to reason. Her mother had raised a trembling hand in farewell, a tattered, soggy Kleenex protruding from her fingers like herniated tissue, but the anesthesia had robbed her of what little control she possessed, and she could not respond in kind. Air had escaped her lungs in a warm, plosive rush that had rattled inside the oxygen mask like thunder and the approach of the onrushing sea. The sedative had burned in her veins, a frigid claw that had embedded itself into her bones and turned her muscles to stones. She had opened her mouth to scream, but the cold had filled her lungs, too, and the last thought in her head before she had been dragged into the void of dreamless sleep had been of helpless terror and an eternal living death from which there would be no salvation.

 _They might've won, the pompous bastards, but seems to me you're the one who came out ahead in the end,_ observed the genteel voice of her maternal grandmother. _After all, honeybunch, you're here, and they're not. Some of them might've gone to that sweet bye and bye on account of their good works, but not as many as they think, I'll wager. Most of them are probably still lost in endless dreams beneath the red clay. The unlucky ones, a fair few, I expect, are roasting in Hell, subject to the treatments they were so fond of inflicting on their helpless patients. I hope Old Nick gives those fools an extra prod or two, the sadistic, vainglorious asses._

 _Which one would Mama be, do you think?_ she asked, but her grandmother made no answer, and she let the question pass.

 _And which one do you think he'll be?_ she asked as she and Dr. McCoy studied one another over the sickbowl.

 _Whichever one he is, he'll never see you as anything but a diagnosis and a pet project,_ reminded the voice of prudence, and she smiled at the bitter truth of it.

It was a pity, though, she reflected as her hand moved to steady the bowl. He was handsomer than most of the doctors she had encountered, with neither grey in his hair nor jowls on his face. There was no thinning hair or doughy paunch, no burst capillaries across his nose to belie a long and intimate affair with the bottle. There were no nicotine-stained fingers or sweat-stained collars. Indeed, he was crisp and lean in his blue tunic and black pants; his eyes were bright and inquisitive inside his face, and his hair was thick and lustrous and sleek beneath the lights of the room. If she was truly meant for yet another go-round with the cold, impersonal machinery of medicine and healing, then at least she could take solace in the view.

Her musings were interrupted by another bout of retching. _I'm going to dislocate my jaw,_ she thought morosely as her fingers spasmed idiotically around the rim of the bowl and her innards struggled to expel a gout of foul air and stringers of translucent bile.

"Is this ever going to stop?" she moaned as she sagged against the lone pillow.

"Like I said, it's going to be a rough night."

"Don't you have Phenargan?"

"Phenargan?" He scoffed. "That hasn't been used in more than a hundred years. I have a few anti-emetics, but none I'm willing to give you until I can figure out what I'm dealing with."

She bridled. "What you're dealing with is a human being," she retorted peevishly.

"That much I got, yeah," he returned sardonically. "I'm a doctor in case you couldn't tell."

"Oh, I could tell," she assured him coldly, and spat into the sickbowl.

McCoy scowled, but before he could reply, a man in a green tunic swept into the room.

"What've we got, Bones?" he asked briskly, and came to a stop beside the elf at the foot of her bed.

"This is Rosalie Walker, and if my math is correct and she's not lying or out of her mind, then she's been in cryogenic stasis for two hundred and forty years."

That pronouncement clearly brought the man up short. He drew back, a rooster dodging the claws of a barnyard tom, and blinked. "Really?" He surveyed her with open curiosity, hands clasped behind his back. "Is there any reason to think she's crazy?"

The doctor grunted and peeled off his gloves. "Well, she exhibits symptoms of a condition that hasn't been seen since 2179, so not really."

"What?" she spluttered incredulously. "You found a cure? Then why-?"

"Miss Walker," the man interrupted with an air of suave authority, "I'm Captain James Kirk of the _U.S.S. Enterprise._ "

 _Captain?_ her mind echoed, flummoxed. _This has got to be a fucked-up anesthesia dream. This guy looks like a frat boy doing service hours at a costume social. Twenty-six at the oldest. Captain, my ass._

"Captain?" she repeated. "What, am I on a cruise ship?"

A strangled squawk escaped the doctor, who was tossing his gloves into a biohazard bin. The elf raised an eyebrow. For his part, the purported captain's lips twitched in amusement. "No. You are on a starship."

"Uh huh. Bullshit. What is this? Did you guys figure out that you can't fix me after taking my parents' money, so now you're pulling this ridiculous charade as some screwy consolation prize?"

"I can assure you that you are, in fact aboard a starship," the elf said.

"Says a guy dressed like a futuristic wood elf. I know you people don't have much faith in the intellectual capacity of the waist-level set, but come on. Nowhere in my extensive medical file does it say I chew crayons or shampoo with Spaghetti-Os."

"I am not a wood elf," the elf protested stiffly. "I am a Vulcan."

"Oh, would you cut the horseshi-"

"Miss Walker, you really are on a starship," Kirk interjected.

"What kind of idiot do you take me for?"

Kirk sighed and turned to the elf. "Mr. Spock, open the sickbay shutters."

Spock whirled and strode to the far wall, where he tapped a code into a numeric keypad. There was a soft chime, and then a window materialized out of a formerly solid black panel.

"Oh," she breathed, and then the breath caught in her throat. Outside the window yawned an unfathomable vastness, a blackness so complete that it hurt her eyes to look at it. It was solid, liquid sable, and she thought that if she reached out, it would skim beneath her questing fingers like ink or cold pitch, smooth and clinging and jealous of the light that escaped its depths from the stars that streaked past the window in a fleeting flare of light.

 _Holy fire,_ she thought. _The ephemeral, brilliant flutter of angels' wings._ Her throat constricted, and her chest cramped with terror and ecstasy and a swooning, reverential awe. She coughed and cleared her throat, and tears burned on her cheeks. "Oh, my God. It's heaven."

"It's space," the captain corrected.

She let out a shuddering breath and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. "How? When? The last time I was vaguely upright, our biggest cosmic claim to fame was the international space station we shared with the Russians. The Hubble telescope was a multibillion dollar failure because someone put the lens in backwards, and _The Columbia_ disintegrated on re-entry because some lazy engineer couldn't be assed to inspect the O-rings. You're telling me that this braintrust managed to get us into space? And not just in some rattletrap interstellar version of a Dodge Dart?"

"That's the short version, yes." Kirk's eyes twinkled with amusement.

"Oh, God," she managed thickly. Her stomach lurched and roiled in its uneasy moorings, and she pressed her curled hand to her trembling lips to forestall the building nausea.

"it's better to get it out now," McCoy advised. "Otherwise, you'll just do it later."

So she heaved into the bowl, coughing and spluttering and trying vainly to keep the ends of her hair out of the mess. "I'm going to need a shower," she croaked when the latest wave had spent itself.

"That can be arranged once I've established that you're not a walking disease vector."

"I was up to date on my vaccinations when I went in. It was one of the requirements."

"Your records are probably so much yellow dust in some warehouse by now, so you'll have to excuse the abundance of caution. Your bloodwork should be ready within the hour."

"Bloodwork? You took my blood while I was under? What else did you do?" She narrowed her eyes at him, visions of unethical pelvic exams dancing in her head. "Isn't there such a thing as consent forms anymore?"

 _Oh, honey, you're not wearing but that flimsy smock they put you in at the popsicle factory,_ her grandmother pointed out prosaically. _If he wanted an eyeful, he probably got one when they transferred you onto this bed._

McCoy drew himself up. "I was trying to save your life," he hissed. "In case you haven't noticed, we just fished you out of God knows how many quadrillion square miles of uncharted space. If we hadn't come along, you'd still be adrift in that ancient cryotube."

 _Somebody has a flair for the dramatic,_ she mused as he stared at her in wide-eyed indignation, lips pressed into a thin, furious line. She turned to the captain. "So I really am in space?"

"I'm afraid so."

McCoy huffed and stalked around her bed to a desk littered with papers and several racks of test tubes, some of which were filled with blood. Others held fluids she could not identify. He snorted in disgust and plopped into his chair. He picked up a thin, black stylus and promptly tossed it aside. He scowled at her and shook his head.

 _I touched a nerve,_ she thought with a pang of chagrin. "But if I'm in space in the twenty-third century, then why am I still like this?" She gestured at her spindly, hairy, unfeminine legs and flapped hands that sat akimbo on the ends of her wrists. "They were supposed to fix this. That was the whole reason they made me a living mummy and stuffed me into that sarcophagus."

The memories came hard and fast, an overwhelming rush that left her dizzy and frightened. Panic fluttered in her belly and at the edges of her mind, and her heart began to triphammer inside her chest.

_It smelled like an airlock, cold steel sterilized by NASA-grade Pine Sol. Like alcohol on a cotton swab. Everything was so bright, and what wasn't steel and Plexiglas was white. White floors, white walls, white men in white coats with unnaturally white teeth you couldn't see for the white surgical masks they wore. They even wore white shoes covered by white booties. Their footfalls never made a sound on that gleaming floor. They were ghosts in the catacombs, the mouthless, noseless stewards of all those bodies in those tubes, all those tanks._

_They bobbed, the people in those tanks, fetuses in a transparent womb. I remember that woman with the red hair. It was so long and dark, and it undulated like tendrils of kelp. It looked like blood oozing from a wound, but I couldn't look away. It was perversely beautiful, a rose rising from the ribcage of a corpse, and who knows how long I would have sat there, gaping, if Mama hadn't pushed me away._

_It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd put me in one of the tanks, if they had let me bob while my hair floated around my face like gold rising to the surface of a river. I could have spent eternity there, riding the currents until science conquered my parents' bogeyman or time conquered the steel of the tanks and rust reduced them to so many red flakes on that pristine floor. It would have been like flying, like riding the wind on the tail of a kite._

_But they didn't put you in the tanks,_ said her younger brother, Daniel. _Mom and Dad wouldn't stop at much to fix their precious little problem, but they would stop at that. The tanks ran pretty steep, and if they sprung for that, then they might not be able to vacation in Majorca or the French Riviera anymore, and they certainly wouldn't be paying for my graduate school. They'd already sacrificed so much for you--their dreams of a perfect family, of a little girl in pigtails and lace who grew up to be the belle of the debutante ball and won the heart of a councilman's son; the hope of the wedding of the season; their time, their patience, their carefree life of three vacations a year and nightly dinners at the country club; their privacy, because how the tongues did wag whenever they brought you to a function, dressed in your girly frills and slouched in your tasteful black wheelchair or your tasteful white one; their money. God, how much of_ that _did they spend?_

_You cost fifty thousand dollars before the ink on your tiny, pink foot was dry. Then there were the weeks in the NICU and the cans of special formula and the consultations with neonatal specialists. When you finally came home, there was the "nanny" who was a pediatric RN. Round-the-clock care and days filled with appointments. Surgery to correct your amblyopia so you wouldn't be blind on top of crippled._

_Head start programs and physical therapy before you could talk, and occupational therapy when you could. Your playmates were certified therapists who charted every twitch, and when you were home, your imaginary worlds were built on the backs of specialized toys. Your Barbies had Velcro clothes, and you had entire crops of Potato Heads. An entire wing of the house was modified just for you, and your graceless, fat-handled silverware joined the Zwiling J.A. Henckels in the utensils tray. Chairs that had been a matching foursome since Grandma bought them in 1965 suddenly became a threesome to make room for your wheelchair at the table, and heavy glasses were joined by plastic cups that clumsy, weak fingers couldn't drop and shatter._

_There was private preschool and private tutors, and the summer before preschool, there were I.Q. tests administered by smiling proctors in pinstriped ties. The folks wanted to make sure there weren't more embarrassments in store, more endless needs to be met. It was bad enough that the biddies at the country club clucked and cooed over "that poor child" and her awkward, gangly limbs. Some of the older matrons even sniffed behind their champagne flutes about the wages of secret sin. If it turned out that you were touched in the head, as the old saying went, well, that would be more than a family could stand, and it might be time to talk about placement in some discreet, private school with an innocuous name, where pupils were just as much patients, and where RN and LPNs outnumbered the MAs and Ph.Ds._

_Luckily for you, what God denied you in body, He made up for in brains. Precocious, the doctors and child psychologists called you. Smart as a whip is what Grandma Lavinia called you, and she was closer to the truth. Precocious implies a coyness, an oily manipulation, a shade of minicry in your cleverness. But you were just flat smart. You might not've been able to pick up those shiny, plastic shapes those therapists loved shoving into your hands, but by God, you knew where they went. While your peers were busy learning the finer points of potty training and sampling the fine dirts on offer at Atlanta's most exclusive parks and playgrounds, you were grouping shapes by similarity and reading Little Golden Books that Grandma Lavinia bought you by the armload. Your fingers might not be able to hold the Crayons, but you were only too quick to set your aides straight on just what color Little Red Riding Hood's cloak ought to be, no please and thank you about it._

_You're the one who taught me to read, in fact, eight years old and holding me on your lap in a spastic grip while you read from the_ Wonderful World of Richard Scary _and kissed the top of my fuzzy, toddler's head. Damned if friends and relatives didn't all but wet themselves at the sight, as though you were a unicorn on a unicycle and not a little girl doing what you could to be a good big sister._

_You blew up the skirts of the doctors, too. You'd have thought that crippled and intelligent were mutually exclusive states of being the way they clustered around you on the exam table and marveled at your test scores. You reveled in it when you were little. It made you feel like the princess you always wanted to be, Cinderella in No. 2 slippers. And the folks were only too happy to have proof of your finest quality, evidence that you were more than the living embodiment of God's wrath. They framed the results of your tests and hung them in the living room and in your room opposite your bed. There were half a dozen by the time you started kindergarten. By the time you left for UGA in the fall of 2009, the proofs of your brilliance had covered every square inch above the mantel and turned the beige walls of your bedroom into a glittering wonderland of framed certificates and elegant shadowboxes. The brassy, golden men of my sports and karate trophies could never hope to compete with the blizzard of white, shunted into the corners of the study bookshelves and confined to a display case alongside Hummel angels and crystal koala bears who looked upon the world with pinprick onyx eyes._

_Your glass slippers turned out to be your ticket to freedom, and you seized it with both hands. The folks enrolled you in Montessori schools and baccalaureate programs, and when they turned out to be inaccessible, they offered to pay for the necessary renovations. If the school turned up its nose in the name of tradition and the greater good of the other students, then they invoked the specter of lawyers and depositions and discrimination lawsuits. Most of the time that did the trick, and on the rare occasion that it didn't, they never hesitated to pull you out and drop a parting phone call to the local papers._

_They hired PCAs to accompany you to school. They took notes and held open doors and took you to the bathroom just after lunch. They carried your tray in the cafeteria and opened your carton of milk or bottled water and sawed at your mystery meat with knife and fork. They straightened your clothes and combed your hair, and when you got to high school, they seconded you at meetings of the Spanish Club and the forensics league meetings. They chaperoned you to meets for the latter, and they were your amanuenses when you went to Prague your junior year and Barcelona and Berlin your senior, the arms and legs and straining backs that muscled you over curbs without cuts and wrestled you into bathrooms never meant to accommodate wheelchairs._

_They were your faithful shadows in starched whites and sensible shoes, and they cost a pretty penny. Just how much, you never knew never bothered to ask. Their presence was just the way of it, had been for as long as you could remember, as ordinary and expected as the escritoire in Daddy's study and the big-screen in the den._

_You certainly never asked what was sacrificed to the rapacious maw of your best interests. Not until it was too late, until you came looking for an ally against our folks and their plan to free themselves from the smothering crush of you and found only relief in my expression._

_They spent and spent, rivers of green, and in the end, your ticket to freedom didn't get you very far. You were the salutatorian of your graduating class and the teacher's pet of damn near every professor and two-bit TA you ever had, but you weren't the belle of any balls, and invitations to parties didn't come pouring in. Most nights, you stayed in the private dorm room Mama and Daddy paid for and read or watched television. On the good nights, you watched a movie with the night PCA and told yourself that partying wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Most of the time, you believed it, but sometimes... Oh, sometimes._

_You weren't without friends. You attracted a few during your undergrad years and a few more during your master's. They were fellow dreamers and overachievers, nerds with their eyes fixed on some distant prize. There was Archie, the mathematics whiz who saw the world as a series of equations, right down to the interpersonal relationships; Quinn, the perky Okie who dreamed of teaching a roomful of tots the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic; there was Soon Jung, who found her purpose in the echoing whispers of men long dead or locked away in their ivory towers. You often pitted your love of history against her philosopher's aspirations in rousing debates that drew in others, and when you had reasoned your way to a grudging stalemate, Archie would wade in, armed with the holy writ of theorems and formulae and postulates bolstered by the immutable, unshakeable bulwark of numbers. It was a merry maelstrom then, a giddy chaos of absolutes and wherefores and what-ifs, and you often emerged from those sessions as exultant and intoxicated as any hedonistic undergrad on a three-bar tour._

_And there were the PCAs, of course. They weren't friends of your own choosing, but it's hard not to be intimate with someone who sees you naked twice a day and wipes your ass when you're too tired and spastic to do it yourself. So they became confidantes of necessity, wingmen conspicuous in their white scrubs and crepe-soled shoes. They were meant to preserve your oft-battered dignity by ensuring you didn't slop drinks down your front or swallow your hair with your hamburger or piss down your leg because you couldn't fit into the bathroom, and so they did, but their hovering presence also repelled the very people you so desperately wanted to attract. It was hard to get cheerfully wasted beneath the watchful, disapproving gaze of a gimp wrangler, and not even the most indiscriminate frat boy wanted to ply his seductive wiles on a woman who needed a second to help her out of her panties and into position._

_So your hours and your nights were your own, and the only thing left to you were the handful of secrets you could hide from the watchful, prying gazes of your aides cum overseers, who dutifully recorded every tear and every drop of piss in their duty logs. There weren't friends enough to fill the empty spaces and the endless hours, and there was certainly no rosy future with a husband and children on the horizon. Just the interminable stretch of days before you, a road that went ever on and on, only to end where it began, in a room filled with artificial light and the dust of dead men's bones on the air._

_Maybe that's why you agreed when Mama suggested a tour of the cryogenics facility the summer after you got your master's. You were so proud of that hank of lambskin, so fit to burst, but you were lost, too, and dazed at the prospect of life after school. There, you were primus inter pares, first among equals, and sure of your place, of your purpose. You were respected by teachers and fellow students alike, flaunted by the former as incontrovertible proof of their intellectual and didactic prowess and viewed with curiosity by the latter, who saw in your twisted limbs and stellar marks a contradiction their parents' wisdom could not explain._

_But outside those walls, those classrooms and lecture halls with their whiteboards and neat rows of desks, you were just a woman with a high-dollar degree and a crushing liability under your scrawny behind. Your only work experience was as student-assistant to the history chair, and there were plenty of fresh faces with your degree who could do the work with half the difficulty. There was no thesis or resume you could write that would blind prospective employers to the insurance nightmare you posed or the specter of an ADA lawsuit waiting in the wings when your piddling, entry-level position was axed in favor of a raise for the principal or the board of regents. Perhaps the goodwill of your professors could secure you an interview, but there were no guarantees, and while goodwill might open doors, it made no promises as to what might lie behind them. Maybe you'd end up as some eager-beaver T.A., teaching Intro World history to glassy-eyed freshmen and catching all the shit that rolled downhill from the ivory tower you coveted, but you might also wind up working a desk job at the local senior center, answering the phone and handing out fliers for free blood pressure checks, bingo nights, and diabetes awareness month, living a subsistence life on the lavender-scented largesse of withered old spinsters and cancer widows trying to buy their way past the pearly gates at the eleventh hour._

_You weren't sure you wanted a life of what-might-have-been, so you saw no harm in making the trip. It was an option, a failsafe in case your modest plans collapsed in the face of condescension and cold-blooded pragmatism. So you presented yourself at this latest temple of Blue Cross and Blue Shield and let the salesmen in doctor's whites shepherd you through their sterile, sacred halls._

_But there was nothing hallowed about that ground. It was perverse, a monument to hubris where death was denied its rightful tribute and frightened people were stuffed into steel sarcophagi like well-fleshed mummies. It was a mockery of the natural order, of Grandmama Lavinia's belief that even things that happened just because had a purpose beyond human understanding, a ripple of consequence, unintended or otherwise, that turned the course of the world. It was terror and arrogance and vanity and greed, and you feared it. You wanted nothing to do with it, and you were so glad when the tour was over that you let out a reedy, cackling half-sob of relief._

_Mama and the doctor mistook it for the wordless mewling of indescribable hope, thought you a cripple who had glimpsed the face of Jesus and stretched forth an imploring hand, and when the doctor clapped a reassuring hand on your shoulder and Mama hugged you hard enough to make your bones creak and grind and dropped a tearful kiss on the top of your head, you smiled and sniffled and let them believe it, but you knew better. There was nothing of God there. On the contrary, you had stood upon the precipice of Hell and seen but obliquely its dark and frozen heart._

_You were a rabbit but narrowly escaped from the snapping jaws of the beast, and you had no intention of going back there. You considered it a filial duty faithfully executed and resolved to pursue your Ph.D in the fall. School had always been the simple, routine way of it, and if Mama was disappointed, then the sting of it would surely ease once she saw you in yet another cap and gown with yet another honor cord around your neck. A doctorate was rarer and more prestigious than a master's, and if a bachelor's degree was the glass slipper that gained you admittance to the castle, then the doctorate was the one that would see you into the ivory tower of your childhood dreams._

_But that was before I told you the truth, opened your eyes to what you had been doing to the family for all these years with your incessant need. All those laurels of which you were so proud had cost more than you realized. Not just in tuition and fees, but the salaries of the therapists and the PCAs who tended to your every whim around the clock. Daddy was a wealthy man, a man who had earned his place in the gated community and at the country club golf course by the sweat of his brow and his endless reservoir of determination. Mama was the sweetest flower of a distinguished Savannah family whose bloodline ran deep into the Southern soil. Her money was as old as the South, steeped in cotton and tobacco and all those ugly truths we try so hard to bury when we gather for the Fourth of July barbecue. Old money runs out as fast as new, though, and while your little problem hadn't bled them dry, it had certainly left them more than a little peaky, as Grandmama Lavina was wont to say._

_It wasn't just a question of money, either. It was about all the hours Daddy put in behind the desk at the brokerage firm and the ones Mama lost shuttling you to doctors' appointments and IEP meetings and equestrian therapy three times a week. It was in the loss of privacy in their social circle. The rules of civility meant that nobody stared or asked gauche questions over the brisket, but the particulars of your disability were hardly subtle and couldn't be hidden behind gracious smiles and layers of of lace and satin and delicate perfume, and the gossip mill was happy to speculate on the reasons for your misfortune and the extent to which the good Lord had visited his judgment upon your fragile head. They sipped their snifters of brandy and glasses of dessert wine and whispered about genetic abnormalities and childhood hysterectomies and shortened life expectancies with salacious glee, shaking their heads in doleful, clucking sympathy even as they shivered with dark and shameful anticipation of your tragic demise. Most of it was pure foolishness, the idle, idiotic musings of the woefully uninformed, but juicy gossip is the meat and marrow of Southern life, the darker the better, and if the facts must needs be brushed hastily aside in the telling of a good story, then so be it. Your death, when it came, would be the social event of the season, the grim, tragic denouement of a Flannery O'Connor Gothic._

_Mama and Daddy never said mum about any of it, of course. No society woman worth her pedigree exposed either her wounds or her ass to public scrutiny, and Daddy loved you too much to burden you with such knowledge. A real man, a good man, bore his burdens in stoic silence and kept his regrets behind lips sealed with whiskey and a Cuban cigar. They insulated you from it with assiduous care, built for you a tower of security and blissful ignorance. It was only money, after all, and if the price of your keep was dear, then surely an even dearer price had been exacted from your weak and unwilling flesh._

_I loved you, too, but I had the courage to be my sister's keeper and pluck the scales from your eyes. I showed you the true cost of your life, and once you saw, you understood the eagerness in Mama's eyes that afternoon at the facility and the bruises beneath Daddy's when he straggled home from the office long after dark and made a beeline for the liquor cabinet, loosening his tie as he went. You understood why she kept broaching the subject after your initial refusal, and why Daddy kept watching you over the rim of his tumbler._

_Guilt pinned their tongues, stifled the secret, craven desire of their hearts. They loved you--you were their firstborn, their mourning dove with broken wings--but they resented you, too. You were their albatross of bills and custom orthotics and spoked wheels they needed replacing every two years, and they wanted you gone. They wanted to return to the life they had known before you, a life of soirees and fundraisers for underprivileged children and charity golf tournaments for a disease that didn't wear their child's face; a life without timetables and PCA schedules and vacations that needed months of advance planning; a life not lived in a prison whose borders were determined by the distance your wheels and your fickle constitution could travel._

_You might have been bent and feeble and spastic, but you were also as stubborn and bound by dignity and honor as your forebearers, as Grandmama Lavinia, who could take the starch out of a blowhard with a single gelid look, and as great-great-granddad Eustace Ewell Peabody, who charged the Yankees with nothing but an upraised saber at the Battle of Chickamauga and got a bellyful of grape shot for his troubles. You couldn't walk or curtsey or even wipe your ass, but you understood sacrifice and loyalty and upholding the family honor._

_You were an invalid, but you were neither stupid nor a coward, and so when Mama broached the subject again just after midsummer, you swallowed your terror and your dinner roll and told her you thought it was a fine idea. After living life at waist-level, you reckoned you wanted to see how the other half lived, to feel the solidity of the earth beneath your feet and the center of gravity in its rightful place in your pelvis instead of at the bottom of your ass. You wanted to look people in the face instead of speaking to their crotch like it was a goddamn microphone, and you wanted to run and skip and lose your footing in the rain. You wanted to dance, to tuck your knees to your chest without fighting yourself every step of the way and toppling sideways onto the bed or floor like an expelled fetus. And oh, yes, a good and proper fuck would be nice, one born of lust and not drunken, misguided pity or the horny desperation of a frat boy with initiation and a twenty riding on the outcome._

_It was the truth artfully told. You had dreamed of all those things in the privacy of your room, when the house was quiet and the PCA had retired to her room for the night to conduct an ill-fated romance by the glow of her cellphone's light, but you never wanted to pay for them in years, never wanted to while away the years in a steel sarcophagus. If the informational DVDs and glossy brochures were true and the aging process was suspended by the magic of chemical stasis, what of it? The world around you would not be so fortunate or so damned. It would go on. Summer would pass into fall and then into winter, and snow would drift over the branches of the magnolia tree in the yard and coat the road like a fine layer of salt. There would be Thanksgiving and Christmas at Grandmama Lavinia's, with tinsel and candy canes on the tree and holly and mistletoe on the mantel. There would be eggnog, and Grandmama Lavinia in her Christmas finery. There would be the family portrait, the sprawl of four generations arranged before the family matriarch, who would preside over the proceedings from the comfort of her favorite wingback chair, resplendent in sequins and pearls. Daddy beside her on the left and Uncle Theo on the right, both with their hands on Grandmama's shoulders, and Uncle Beau crouched next to the arm of her chair, one arm propped on the arm of her chair. You always sat on her right, a break in the ordered familial hierarchy dictated by your wheelchair. Except you wouldn't be there. Not that year, and maybe not for many years thereafter. Of all the diseases and conditions humanity had vowed to eradicate, congenital CP was near the bottom of the list._

_The family would change in your absence, expand with new life and contract as the old and familiar took one step too many on Father Time's march and shuffled flat off this mortal coil. Grandmama would go to glory, her title of family matriarch claimed by Mama or one of our uncles' insipid wives. Cousins would outgrow their shortpants, and silver and grey would thread Daddy's hair before it turned white as the cotton that still grew in sporadic tufts out back the house. Sherman, the brutal son of a bitch, hadn't gotten it all, after all._

_And the world... Who knew just how much it would change while you breathed recycled air and drifted in the dark like a disembodied soul, a ghost denied the final dignity of death? The history degree for which you had so diligently worked would be worthless, a quaint relic of a bygone era, a souvenir from an insignificant dream. New cities would rise from the bedrock, while old ones fell into decay and crumbled into dust. There would be new heroes and their attendant villains, new crises to be endured and immortalized in granite and bronze and commemorative coins hawked on late-night infomercials. Rebellion would give rise to new nations whose names your tongue had never tasted, and presidents for whom you had never voted would swear to uphold the Constitution of these United States. Assuming, naturally, that we hadn't gotten our fool selves blown to the Kingdom Come we claim so zealously to revere and represent._

_That assumed, of course, that you returned to the world at all. Maybe it was a scam for the desperate and dying and the terminally vain. Maybe those state-of-the-art facilities were a sham, a front set up by the mob to lure the starry-eyed dupes, and once the checks cleared, the buildings and their occupants would be abandoned, the helpless hopefuls left to pickle in their own juices while the doctors ditched their scrubs and jetted off to a resort in the Balkans. You and your fellow dawn treaders would be lost to thought and time, at least until the equipment failed or the buildings went back on the market after the rent checks stopped._

_Or maybe the world would just go to hell, and you'd sleep through the apocalypse, mercifully deaf, dumb, and blind as the world burned. Maybe you'd be vaporized in a nuclear furnace when Kim Jong-il or his equally crackpot son finally snapped and pushed the red button, or maybe you'd plummet into the void when the earth heaved and spasmed and shook itself apart. Could be that the end would be slower, less a wracking calamity and more an inexorable attrition. Death by starvation or plague or mass sterility or simply a great, collective inertia and apathy so complete that we couldn't be bothered to go on living._

_However it happened, you'd never emerge from that cryotube, a wobbling Lazarus restored to life by the miracle of modern science. No, you'd just linger in a tube buried beneath dust and rubble and forgetfulness, a life forever interrupted. You'd slumber there for centuries, and the earth, having at last thrown off the crushing, malignant yoke of man, would flourish. Trees would sprout in the ruins of skyscrapers and rise from the damp soil of wells and cisterns, and grass would thrust its way through cracks in the sidewalk in a final, lush triumph over man's failed dominion. Ivy and moss would crawl over the facades of buildings, including your unmarked grave, and the birds that nested in the narrow cornices and hollows of shattered lampposts would sing odes to a sunrise no longer obscured by smog._

_You would be so many bones beneath the earth, as inconsequential to memory as the mutt buried beneath an apple tree by a boy long gone, and when the alien archaeologists descended on the planet and excavated the facility, they would pry open your cryotube and gaze, nonplussed, at your sad remains. They would poke and prod and speculate, and the more speculative among them would theorize that your warped bones were irrefutable evidence that humankind had fallen prey to a terrible, degenerative plague. This, they would proclaim with the overweening confidence of the highly-educated and supremely-shortsighted, was the cause of their extinction. Some would believe, and some would disagree, but united by singular purpose, they would pack you up and cart you off to some anthropological lab, where they'd thread wire through your defleshed bones and use them in xenobiology class._

_God knows what they'd make of the woman in the tank, the one whose red hair fanned around her head like a spreading bloodstain. Maybe nothing, or maybe they'd think she was an aquatic variant of the species and alien schoolchildren would flock to see her, their wide, reptilian faces pressed to the window of the exhibit while a guide who'd lost his sense of wonder three months and a hundred tours ago went through his spiel by rote, a tape worn thin by constant repetition. To the scientists, she would be a tantalizing evolutionary enigma, but to the public, especially to the children gathered around her tank, she would be The Mermaid Girl From Earth, a slice of P.T. Barnum's garish, ghoulish wonder brought into the distant future._

_The thought filled you with a dull, swooning dread, and in your mind's eye, you saw strands of red hair bobbing on the surface of a man-made sea and shiny, metal cylinders arranged in neat, symmetrical rows. Doctors with dead eyes above filtered surgical masks and booties over there crepe-soled shoes. Loveless and deathless and cold, purgatory's vestibule, and you recoiled from it with every fiber of your being, but your heart saw Mama and Daddy with its eyes wide open for the first time, and the ill-concealed hope in her eyes was as painful as the anguished, guilty relief in his. In that moment, with your fork full of green beans and your mouth full of half-truths, you loved and despised them both._

_Love won in the end, because with the truth I had so kindly revealed to you had come guilt, hot and gnawing and crushing as a pressing stone. Our folks had sacrificed their dreams and comfort for you, had worked until all that remained of life was the hard, ugly pith of it. You had used them up, a tick draining the life from its unsuspecting host. You owed them more than your accomplishments could ever hope to repay, owed them a life free of the crippling burden of your imperfection. Maybe that place was purgatory, a sentence of living death, but it was also your chance to settle a debt. If the good Lord chose to bestow His grace upon you, then perhaps a cure would be found within their lifetimes and you could return to them as the daughter they'd no doubt dreamed of so many years ago, when you were nothing but a bump in Mama's belly. If He had other plans for you, His unfinished child, then at least they would be free to live the lives they deserved._

_So, there was only one choice to make. They gave you one last summer, and you savored every hour with the manic fervor of the condemned. You spent the last week with Grandmama Lavinia, who was blissfully unaware of your intentions, and when you left, you cried so hard you made yourself sick, sobbing into the fabric of her favorite summer blouse and inhaling her perfume. Your uncharacteristic hysteria startled and frightened her, and she didn't want to let you go, but Mama was too close to her prize to be thwarted now, and she pulled you away and stowed you in the passenger seat and told her that it had just been a trying time for you, what with your impending job search now that school was done._ A lie! A dirty lie! _you wanted to scream, but the bargain had been struck, so you clutched the door handle like a drunkard and let the lie stand. The last time you saw Grandmama Lavinia, she was standing on the shady veranda of her house with the summer breeze in her hair and your tears on her collar._

_Mama sang all the way home._

_I wasn't there when they took you to the cryogenics facility. I was in Rio, living it up before I entered grad school at Brown. Your selfless decision had freed up the funds, you see, and I was determined to make the most of them. I was sunbathing three thousand miles away when the little girl who had once read_ Sleeping Beauty _while I wriggled and gurgled on her lap went to sleep herself, pricked, not by a spindle, but by a hypodermic needle slipped into her vein. Perhaps it was grief or a pang of conscience, or maybe I was so glad to be shut of you that I couldn't wait to celebrate my freedom. You didn't have time to wonder then, with the sedatives a cold delirium in your blood, pulling you into the smothering darkness, but you wonder now, you surely do._

She could confess none of this to the men gathered around her bed, however. It was too raw and lunatic and private. It was the last of Before, and she would not surrender it. So she fought to subdue her rising panic and slow her pounding heart. From the corner of her eye, she saw McCoy scramble from his seat, drawn by the shrill bleating of the cardiac monitor.

"I-I'm all right," she stammered unconvincingly, and flapped ineffectually at him. "I'm fine. It's just some memories that have bubbled to the surface."

A grunt from McCoy, who duly waved a miniature salt shaker over her from head to toe, a shaman cleansing her of impurities with faith and holy smoke. "That happens sometimes, but your vitals are all over the place right now." He peered at a readout she could not see. "I'm not sure she should be doing this now," he said to Kirk. "Better to let her stabilize."

 _I'm not going to stabilize,_ she thought irascibly. _Not as long as those memories are stuck in my head._ "I'm fine," she repeated peevishly, and scowled at the salt shaker. She turned her attention to Kirk. "My parents had me put into stasis so they could find a cure for my CP. I don't think they thought it would take this long."

 _Or maybe they did,_ whispered a cold voice inside her head, and she thought of her mother singing all the way home that last afternoon, of the wild hope in her eyes when she capitulated over green beans and mashed potatoes. 

"Do you remember the name of the facility?" Spock asked.

"Cumberland Cryogenics Corporation. It was in Atlanta near Emory Medical Center." The phantom tip of a hypodermic needle pierced the crook of her arm, and she absently rubbed at the thin flesh there. "But I still don't understand. I wasn't supposed to be brought out until a cure was found, and I damn sure wasn't supposed to be in space."

"I don't have any answers for you, Miss Walker, but when I do, you'll be the first to know." Kirk drummed his fingers on the end of her bed.

 _There's one I haven't heard before._ "What happens to me in the meantime?"

"We're several weeks from the nearest starbase. Until then, you'll remain under the care of Dr. McCoy. Once you're up to it, we'll move you to temporary quarters." He drummed his fingers on the end of the bed again and turned to the doctor in question. "Keep me posted, Bones. "I'll be on the bridge."

"Bones?" she sputtered incredulously. "His nickname is Bones? Oh, that's reassuring." She eyed Dr. McCoy warily and edged away from his side of the bed.

"Fantastic," he growled, and leveled a thunderous expression at the captain, who was unmoved by his pique.

Kirk gave a rakish grin and a jaunty salute and disappeared through the sliding doors.

"Doctor," Spock said, and followed suit.

"What happens now?" she asked wearily when the doors had closed.

"Now you finish purging your system, and I wait for your bloodwork." He plopped into the chair behind his desk and picked up his stylus, which he tapped on the screen of his tablet.

She nodded to his bowed head and settled back against the pillows, the sickbowl balanced on her lap. Quiet settled over the room, broken only by the rhythmic chirp of the cardiac monitor and the squeak of his chair as he shifted. Now and then, she sat up and dry-heaved into the bowl, and McCoy's head would snap up, eyes alert and body poised to spring into action at the first sign of distress.

The minutes ticked by, and she waited for him to turn off his desk lamp, draw the curtain around her bed, and turn her over to another doctor, but he simply sat at his desk and pecked resolutely at his tablet. His occasional mutterings as he bent to his files were a soothing counterpoint to the strident cry of the monitor overhead. She drowsed, but each time sleep beckoned, the venomous bite of a needle would find her arm, and she would jolt to panicky wakefulness.

Finally, a nurse appeared. "Doctor McCoy?" she said softly, as though she feared waking her. "Her results are in." She passed him a credit-card machine.

 _This medical care provided by Visa,_ she thought, and giggled sleepily.

McCoy studied the credit-card machine. "Thank you," he muttered to the nurse, and set the machine on his desk. Then he approached her bed. "Well, your bloodwork is clean," he announced, and toggled a switch on the side of the bed. A flash of blue static crackled above her bed and disappeared.

"I told you I was." Her voice was hoarse from retching and thick with fatigue. 

"And I told you I couldn't take your word for it." He picked up her sickbowl and placed it on a nearby tray. "I'll bring you a clean one. The nausea seems to be subsiding, but there might be a few more aftershocks. You need to sleep. There's nothing more I can do tonight. In the morning, we can get you cleaned and fed and then discuss treatment options."

"Like what?" she demanded. 

McCoy only shook his head. "Sleep. That's an order," he said sternly.

She wanted to so badly, but the specter of a needle waited on the cusp of dreams, and so she resisted. 

"I know you don't believe this yet," he said softly, "but you're in good hands." He held her heavy-lidded gaze a moment longer, and then he stepped back and drew the curtain around her bed. His shadow drifted over the fabric, a soul untethered from its vessel. It receded from view and returned with a kidney bean in hand, Jack come home from the market with his magic beans.

 _The fresh sickbowl,_ she realized as a disembodied hand slipped through the curtain to place it on the tray.

She expected McCoy to leave once her results had been duly interpreted and recorded, but instead he returned to his seat and resumed his low, garrulous chuntering. It lulled her, a potent, overpowering foe for the fear that seized her muscles and chilled her flesh, and she slept, curled on her side and facing his desk.

She woke twice in the never-ending night, and each time, she was greeted by his silhouette as he hunched over his desk.

 _Are you the gatekeeper of the afterlife?_ she wanted to ask, but her tongue was dry as cotton batting in her mouth, and so she could only watch his shadow seep into the curtain's creases until the needle found her again and dragged her into the darkness.


	3. Negotiations and Cultural Exchange

She was up and alert when he swept into sickbay the next morning, propped in the narrow bed and shoveling oatmeal into her mouth with the grim, stolid resignation of the dray horse in harness. Someone--one of the nurses, like as not--had gotten her cleaned up, because her hair had been washed and combed and sat on her shoulders like a golden shawl. It was such a marked contrast to the limp, tangled hanks he'd seen yesterday that he blinked in surprise.

"Got your appetite, I see," he said as he approached her bed.

"I figured this wouldn't taste so bad if it had to come back up," she explained, and took another bite.

Spoken like a veteran of several hospital wars, and he eyed her as he plucked her chart from the foot of the bed. "Are you still having nausea, then?"

She waggles her head. "Sort of, but not really. My stomach rolls now and then, but it might just be this oatmeal. It tastes like wallpaper pastes lightly dusted with cinnamon and spackle."

His lips twitched as he scrolled through the records of her vitals throughout the night. "Well, you'll have to make your peace with it, because the rest of the food isn't much better." He pursed his lips as he studied her numbers. No spikes in blood pressure, no signs of sleep apnea. Her blood sugar was low, but that might pick up now that she had some food in her.

"You mean these aren't the hospital dregs?"

He answered without looking up. "Well, they are, yes, but it's the same swill as everyone else."

She considered that. "Huh. I figured the captain and the command crew would get the choice bits."

"The replicators on this ship don't discriminate. They're all bad."

"Replicators?" she said blankly.

"They shape molecules into whatever form the user desires. It creates anything from books to clothing to food."

"So, I'm essentially eating air." She eyed the contents of her bowl with newfound trepidation.

"More like a liquid polymer shaped into oatmeal."

She put down her spoon. "Yum."

He rolled his eyes. "It might not be gourmet, but it won't kill you, either. In fact, it's better for you than the poison you were probably stuffing yourself with before you became a human sardine."

"Touche."

"Anyway, I'm not here to discuss replicators."

"No, I suppose not." She picked up her spoon and dug a raisin from the congealing muck in the bowl.

"Are you having any pain?"

"None that's unusual for me."

"What hurts?"

"What doesn't? The miracle you gave me yesterday wore off, and I'm back to being stiff and tense. My ass is asleep from sitting in the same position for the last hour or so, and my fine motor skills have abandoned their posts for a job with better benefits."

He could see the truth of it in her halting, clumsy movements. Her arms twitched frequently and of their own volition, and when they did move of her accord, they did so inelegantly, with fits and starts and spasmodic jerks. Her fingers jutted stiffly from the ends of her hands and splayed wide when she reached for things, thin and arachnid and oddly mesmerizing. The spoon wobbled precariously in her grip, and she was scrupulously careful not to overload it, let it spill its payload down her front. Her other hand moved restively atop the coverlet, and beneath it, her toes jutted like bamboo pikes in black, jungle soil. As he watched, they curled and fanned.

He had spent most of the night researching Cerebral Palsy at his desk and watching her sleep. He had expected her to thrash in the grip of nightmares or call out in the muted, never-quite-dark of the sickbay, but she had been still and quiet, her breathing interrupted only by the occasional snuffle as she rolled onto her side or burrowed beneath the sheet. He had thought she was looking at him once, gaze heavy-lidded and glassy with sleep, but when he had called her name, her only reply had been a soft snore. He had stayed until his vision began to swim and his bones began to creak and groan and speak of the still, small hours. He had been absurdly grateful when Doctor Pennicott had come in for the morning shift. He had put Miss Walker and her charts and her slice of medical history in his hands and shuffled three doors down to his quarters, where he had fallen into bed and a sleep so deep that he could not recall his dreams.

But his mind was as cantankerous as the bones his spiteful ex-wife had so grudgingly left him, and he had found himself awake a few hours later, sporting a ferocious sleep hangover and reading his padd on the toilet while he pulled his pants on one-handed. 

There was surprisingly little information on the subject in the available literature. There were a handful of ancient journal articles by novitiate doctors looking to specialize in neurological or orthopedic medicine, most of which focused on therapies and symptom management in children; there were also an alarming number of references to it in two century-old bioethics treatises that had slanted largely toward the practicality and morality of euthanasia and selective abortion. He had found a pair of grainy videos in the archives, wavering footage that showed a young man struggling through the parallel bars, hands white-knuckled on the finger-smudged metal and lips pulled from his teeth as he floundered across on legs shod in braces better suited to the Iron Maiden than to supporting the atrophied legs they encased. The same boy trapped in a standing box like a prisoner in the stocks, tears streaming down his face as spastic muscles were stretched and straightened, forced to conform to a shape they never intended to take. The boy had cried and begged to be released, the therapists and nurses had cajoled and commanded and ignored, and through it all, a bored servant of Hippocrates had narrated the entire spectacle in a grating, clinical, nasal drone that had made him want to hurl his padd across the room. Sheer barbarism, and he had shut the second video off in disgust.

He had seen his share of neurological and orthopedic impairments in med school, had done rotations in both areas of specialty, but most of them had been acquired after birth, usually later in life, after some enterprising fool had gone out three sheets to the wind and wrapped two of them and his car around a cement pylon. There had been a handful of congenital cases, but those were either easily treatable with neonatal microsurgery or inevitably fatal and therefore skewed toward palliative care rather than improvement or long-term treatment.

He had even been assigned a few cases as a resident, but he had never had the opportunity to see the treatments brought to conclusion. He had conducted evaluations and planned tentative courses of treatment, only to be rotated out or overruled by the supervising physician. He had seldom seen his strategies bear fruit or wither on the healing vine, and he had often wondered what had become of them, those hapless patients passed from hand to hand and mind to mind like convenient tools for the honing of bright but inexperienced minds. They had survived, he supposed, most of them, anyway, and if they were lucky, they had thrived and been granted the luxury of distance and allowed to forget him, or to recall him but dimly as that nice young doctor in white scrubs who made their misfortune a little easier to bear.

And now, propped in a bed in his sickbay was a miracle, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to explore a disability eradicated by modern medicine and long lost to history. She was a living, breathing piece of medical history, a pristine specimen, to put it coldly, and if he could study her... Well, there were untold laurels in her misaligned bones and unruly limbs, a place in the Hippocratic pantheon to be coaxed and teased from her recalcitrant, rigid muscles. There were papers to be written and studies to be proposed and possibly funded, and the results could not only rewrite medical history but revolutionize the fields of anthropology, history, and psychology. 

_She's also a human being,_ he reminded the breathless voice inside his head. _And my patient._

"That miracle is called Loxtan," he said, and set her chart on the foot of the bed, inches from her restless, grubbing toes. He strode to the med cabinet to retrieve a dose.

"It's amazing, is what it is. Is it addictive?"

"No." He opened the cabinet, grabbed an ampoule from the bin labeled in his precise hand, and loaded the hypo. "Why? You have a history of addiction?" He closed the hypo with a snap of his wrist.

"I don't think so. I've never tested myself. Too many alcoholics who weren't spoken of in polite company in the family tree. My dad and aunt got me drunk when I was five," she said cheerfully when he turned around with the hypo in hand. "I don't know if that tells you anything."

_It tells me that your father probably wasn't a Father of the Year candidate,_ he thought darkly, but he merely snagged a wheeled stool on his two-step trek back to the bed. He rolled it to her bedside and plopped onto it, feet pressed to the floor and knees spread in an acute angle.

"I've been researching you," he said as he leaned forward and pressed the hypo to the side of her neck.

She huffed soundless laughter and bared her throat to the cool kiss of the injector. "Really? What's my favorite color?"

He blinked, stymied and chagrined. "Fair enough," he conceded quietly as he depressed the hypo with a soft hiss. "I was researching your condition," he amended.

"And?"

"There's not much to go on. The last known case was before my time." He dropped the hypo on a nearby tray.

"So you've cured it, then? So why am I still like this?" She raised her bony arms to indicate her equally frail legs and let them drop to her lap again.

He shifted on the stool. "It can be treated, yes, but only in infancy or very early childhood. After five or so, the set of the bones and muscles starts to become fixed. Spasticity increases and gets harder to treat without extensive physical therapy and orthotics, and secondary conditions can complicate matters."

"Like arthritis and adolescent osteoporosis," she offered drily.

He nodded. 

"So you can't fix me."

The bluntness of the statement stirred his compassion. "No, I can't. I'm sorry. Theoretically, I could attempt several surgeries. I could implant a neurosynaptic transmitter inside your brain to compensate for the dead tissue, but that wouldn't change the fact that your body wouldn't have the slightest idea how to interpret the new signals it received, and even if it could, your bones and muscles are in no shape to handle them. The transmitter would tell your foot to take a step, and your muscles would either spasm wildly or twitch to no effect, and your heel would disintegrate under the weight. The bones of your feet are so thin that they're translucent on the scans I took. Judging by their condition, I'm guessing you've never stood on them."

She shook her head. "Just long enough to pivot onto the toilet or transfer from my bed to my chair or vice versa. I had aides for the heavy lifting." She smiled humorlessly at the pun.

"I could insert the implant, and I could perform surgery to release the muscles, but they don't like change any more than people do. They would fight the correction. It would be very painful, and there's no guarantee you wouldn't be right back where you started inside a year. The same goes for the bones. I could break them and shave them done to force them into a more natural alignment, but it would be an extremely invasive procedure with a prolonged and excruciating recovery for very little gain. Even if I were to do all that, the outcome would likely be that you needed extensive orthotics to achieve a minimal gait for short distances."

"In other words, I'd look like Frankenstein lurching through the halls?"

"Essentially, yes."

"I'm guessing learning to use those monstrosities would be exhausting."

"Probably."

"Not to mention that I'm broke and don't have a way to pay for any of this."

"Money isn't a problem. Medicine was recognized as a universal human right after the Great War."

"Then...why are you a doctor?"

He stared at her in mute incredulity. "What do mean, why am I a doctor?" he demanded. "To help people."

She snorted. "That'd be a first. Maybe most doctors start out that way, but by the time I got to them, they were dour and jaded and looking to make a buck."

"Well, I've got news for you, Miss Walker. You're not exactly a model patient. Doctors generally take a dim view of people who accuse them of ethics violations," he retorted.

It was her turn to boggle. "Wh- I've never done any such thing," she countered.

"Oh, no?" He straightened on the stool and folded his arms across his chest. "Then I suppose I was imagining it yesterday when you got all bent out of shape over me taking necessary samples?"

Her dumbfounded silence and blank expression surprised him. _She doesn't remember,_ he realized. _She must've still been foggy from the long-term anesthesia. Either that, or there's a problem with her short-term memory._ He made a mental note to conduct a brain scan after the assessment and consultation.

"Sorry about that, Dr. McCoy," she said, and surprised him for the second time in as many minutes. "I was disoriented and scared, and all I saw was a bunch of strangers in funny outfits crowded around my bed like aliens in some trippy abduction experience. Plus, I don't like needles. Spasticity and sharp objects don't mesh."

She sat against the pillows, the bowl of oatmeal forgotten and hardening to cement on the tray in front of her. The spun gold of her hair shimmered in the light, but the rest of her was dull and weary and swaddled in an air of melancholy, as though she were a widow of long standing who had learned to wear the crushing weight of her grief with somber poise. Her shoulders were thin and rounded and slumped, and her face was far too pallid and strained for one so young. She looked perpetually harried, pursued by worries she could neither name nor forsake, and her eyes were remote and watchful inside her face.

_She's too damn young to be this used up_ he thought. _Either life in the twenty-first century was more hardscrabble and unforgiving than the history books thought, or CP and its barbaric treatments wore her out and down to the hard, bitter pith. She's thirty going on ninety. Her bones are, anyway, and while the scans say her heart is fit for a person her age, I think it would just as soon stop as go on beating._

_Well, you've certainly seen that before, haven't you, Lenny, my boy? Been there and done that, as that golden oldie goes,_ said a thoughtful, perversely jocular voice inside his head. _And we both know what you did about it. You and your brother, George in that dark, airless room that stank of piss and rot and festering rage._

"It's fine," he said brusquely. 

"It's safe to assume the hucksters at the cryogenics lab scammed my parents?"

"I can't say," he grunted, relieved to be tugged onto the firmer ground of the present. "But probably."

She sighed. "Walking looked exhausting anyway," she said, but there was a faint tremor in her voice, and that remote gaze drifted over his shoulder to fix on the row of empty beds that stretched to the door.

He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. What the hell could he say to someone whose faint, ferocious hope had been shattered with ruthless efficiency? Someone plucked out of time by the curious fingers of fate and unceremoniously deposited onto a bed in futuristic hospital. He could think of nothing that was not trite or empty, so he kept his useless platitudes to himself and waited for her to break the uncomfortable silence.

"It was my mother's idea anyway," she said softly. Her eyes were dry, but so very flat, windows shuttered in the face of an approaching storm.

_Maybe it was,_ he agreed. _But some part of you wanted it, too, wanted to believe in the dream those charlatans were selling. Maybe it was as simple as curiosity, a desire to see how the rest of the world lived, to know if the sun was warmer on their skin for being nearer. Maybe you wanted to know what it felt like to pull down your damn pants in five seconds instead of holding a referendum on the subject with people who would rather be watching TV. Maybe you wanted to know what it felt like to dance. Or maybe you just wanted the means to run away._

"There are things I can do," he said, determined to give her what little hope and comfort he could. "I can't undo a lifetime of damage, but I can alleviate some of your secondary conditions and make you more comfortable." 

Her lips curved in a weary, sardonic smile, skeptical and bloodless, but her gaze sharpened with idle curiosity and dour amusement.

"I can start you on a daily regimen of calcium supplements and medications to increase bone density. As I said earlier, the bones in your legs and feet are dangerously thin and at risk for fracture. Frankly, I'm surprised you didn't break an ankle getting into the shower. We can keep you on a low daily dose of Loxtan to combat spasticity, and I can prescribe a course of Certaxalin-12 to clear the sediment from your kidneys and improve their function."

"I have poor kidney function?"

"Not poor, no, but it could be better. There's some evidence of chronic dehydration."

"Drinking makes you pee, and peeing takes forever when you need help to do it," she explained matter-of-factly. "I don't want my memories to be dominated by the scintillating hours I spent on the toilet."

"Kidney disease is a lot more inconvenient than taking a pee," he admonished reprovingly. "The Certaxalin should clear the sediment, which would prevent kidney stones and improve circulation and overall function."

"I don't suppose these wondrous miracles of modern pharmacology come in pill form?"

"They do, but the Loxtan is less effective that way. Takes longer to work and doesn't control the spasticity as well, so I'd like keep you on the injectable form. You can insist on the pills if you want, but if you want to stay this relaxed, the hypos are your only option. The Certaxalin comes in a capsule. It tastes like hell if you let it linger, so I'd advise you to swallow them as quick as you can."

He pulled the stool closer to her bed with his heels. "There are a few therapies I'd like to start."

"Ah. Now comes the price."

"Like I've told you, money is no longer a consideration."

"I'm not talking about money, Doctor. I'm talking about time and energy and the chance for peace and privacy. Tell me, Doctor, are these therapies going to eat up my days, drown them in the endless monotony of repetition and the slow burn of attrition? Am I going to have to tell you when I go to the bathroom, and how often, and ask your permission to stay up for five more minutes before I have to turn off my brain and do as I'm told so as to make my imperfection easier for polite company to bear?" Her voice was even, but there was a well of bitterness underneath, one deep and dark and bitter as gall. "Because a life like that isn't life at all. It's survival, and that isn't as glamorous as your uncivilized hindbrain would have you believe when the world goes dark and the water seeps into your nose and mouth and closes over your head like the zipping of a bodybag."

He thought of those tapes, so dispassionate in their wavering gaze as they recorded the struggles of that boy as he clumped doggedly through the parallel bars with his bared teeth and white-knuckled grip. No encouraging parents to cheer him on, no arms poised to catch him should he tire or stumble. Just a blind imperative to succeed and make the pain stop and a wan therapist with a complexion to match her whites who hovered behind him like obligation made manifest to ensure that the deed was done. He thought of that same boy trapped in the standing box with tears streaming down his face. There had been pain there, and fear, and a wretched, yawning loneliness, but no joy, no sense of security and a life bettered by determination and the sweat of his brow. He had not been a patient, but a specimen to be observed and catalogued and dissected. There had been no parents then, either, no friendly faces in which to take comfort. Just the falsely-cheerful voices of the therapists exhorting him to endure in the name of a promised good that never quite came.

_Because a life like that isn't a life at all. It's survival._

He thought of that dark, airless room that stank of piss and festering anger and inexorable loss, and of the thin, quavering voice that called from the shadows, broken and imploring and crushing as a pressing stone. _Please, son. Please. Before it's too late. Please, son. Please._

He pulled the stool forward until his knees were wedged painfully against the base of the bed and his face was scant inches from hers. "Now you listen to me," he growled. "I don't know what kind of medicine you were subjected to back in the good old days. Maybe it was barbarism and snake oil, and if it was, I'm sorry, I truly am, but that was a long time ago, and I'm a doctor, not a shyster or a sadist looking to get his sick kicks on a helpless victim."

"I'm not going to ask you to climb Kilamanjaro, for Christ's sake. Among the many things I am not, I am also not an idiot. If you did anything more strenuous than some stretching and hydrotherapy, the bones in your lower legs would probably fracture, and while your heart is healthy, your stamina is probably a joke. As to your bathroom habits, I don't care what you do as long it's not green and trying to talk on its own. When you're not in therapy, you can do as you please. I am also not a warden."

"Medicine is a risk. I can't tell you for absolute certain what will work and what won't. All I can do is try. Medicine isn't always kind, and it's not always fair, and sometimes it might hurt. Maybe even a lot of the time. I'm sorry for that, too, but there isn't a damn thing I can do about it."

He straightened with a huff. "Now you have some choices to make," he said, and tugged on the hem of his tunic. "I've told you what I can do and what I can't. You can decide to do something, or you can lie there and stew and hate me for the sins of my predecessors if that's what makes you feel better. I'll abide by whatever you choose, but bear in mind that we're a year from our first return to Earth and three weeks at least from the nearest starbase. If you think I'm an incompetent bastard, then I'll stabilize you, and we'll drop you off on the next supply run. The doctors there can deal with your conditions and your attitude, and they'll get you where you want to go. Whatever your choice is, for God's sake, make it soon so I can stop wasting my time and my breath on someone who doesn't want my help."

With that, he pushed away from her bedside so forcefully that he rolled into the empty opposite bed, and then he spun and rose. He snatched her chart from the foot of the bed and hung it on the footboard with a rattling clack. He made to seat himself at his desk but changed his mind at the last moment and veered down the long, wide corridor that led to the door and the deck beyond.

He passed through the doors and into the purposeful hubbub of the corridor. He murmured greetings to the passing ensigns and security officers and strode the short distance to his quarters. He stalked inside, plopped onto his couch, and promptly got up again. He paced to and fro in front of the couch, fingers interlaced behind his head.

_Her behavior is not abnormal given the circumstances,_ noted a flat, clinical voice inside his head that sounded suspiciously like Spock. _Indeed, all things considered, her response has been rather measured. Were most people to be informed that they had been revived two hundred years in the future and were expected to live with an impairment they had been told would be cured, most would have succumbed to either catatonia or raving hysterics._

_It's not her equanimity that chaps my ass,_ he retorted. 

_Then why have you abandoned your post in favor of a fruitless tantrum?_

_I haven't abandoned anything, you pointy-eared hobgoblin,_ he snapped irascibly. _I was just-_

_Running from a ghost that's slipped its shroud?_ another, far less clinical voice supplied helpfully. _You'd need awfully long legs to run that far._

He swore under his breath and left his quarters behind, retracing his steps to sickbay, which was quiet and empty save for the orderlies and the duty nurse who lingered in the corners, counting bottles and vials and ampoules and smoothing sheets beneath which no one slept.

And Miss Walker, of course, small and pale and unmoving in her bed. She tracked his approach as he drew near, small, golden head turning on the delicate stem of her neck. She regarded him with dispassionate blue eyes. They were not cold, precisely, not dead like Khan's, which had surveyed him with ruthless, analytical curiosity, as though he were an interesting specimen to be examined and discarded, but watchful, as though he were an animal she did not yet trust. He waited for her to speak, but she said nothing, so he left her to her baleful silence and seated himself at his desk.

_Khan would have killed her,_ he thought as he studied the latest round of test results, skimming the neat rows of numbers with the tip of his stylus. _He would have taken one look at her and deemed her unworthy of existence. Maybe curiosity would have compelled him to study her for a few hours, to poke and prod and uncover the reason for her fatal, aberrant weakness, but it was more likely that he would have begrudged her the time and effort and snapped her neck as effortlessly as he had broken Carol Marcus' hip and crushed her father's skull._

_Maybe they all would have,_ suggested the blackly gleeful voice that had so helpfully resurrected memories of airless rooms and beseeching voices out of the dark, and in his mind's eye, he saw a boy trapped in a box with tears on his face and his mouth stretched in a howl of anguish that had gone unanswered by his coaxing, white-frocked overseers. _Maybe they were just harder then, tempered by the chaos of the times and twisted by the remorseless race for survival. You can hardly waste tears on others when you can't spare any for yourselves. Jim and Spock thought Khan's cruelty and bloodlessness sprang from his genetic modification. So did you, since we're being so frank, but now you wonder. Walker, Rosalie is how she came to the world, misaligned bones and all, as flawed as Khan was perfect, and yet there's a passing resemblance, the face of a distant relative glimpsed in an old family photograph._

He studied her from the corner of his eye. She had not made a peep since his uneasy return, not to complain or accuse or question. She simply lay beneath the red sheet and stared at the opposite wall, an unappealing expanse of drab grey that hardly merited such intense scrutiny. Now and then, a bony leg shifted or she let her head loll to one side or the other. Sometimes her gaze fell on him, but she never interrupted his feigned perusal of her records or prevailed upon his attention, nor did she call for a nurse. She simply was, silent and grave as a fetch.

_It's not her pissiness that bothers me,_ he admitted as he ordered three dozen more vials of Loxtan. _It's the stoicism and the resignation. She should be yelling and screaming or crying or throwing everything within reach at the walls. She should be asking a hundred questions a goddamn minute or demanding to know just who's running this freakshow carnival or insisting that we're all out of our lunatic minds. She should be trying to hide the fork under the mattress and plotting her escape._

_Only you would complain that things are going too well, Bones,_ the portable version of one James T. Kirk noted, and Bones could see his boyish aw-shucks grin and the amused gleam in his eye. _Why look a gift horse in the mouth?_

_Because I'm not sure it is a gift. It's convenient, sure, but it's wrong, too, off-kilter, like a picture blurred to soft focus or a narrow hallway after one too many shots. I'm glad she's not screaming down the walls or trying to open a vein on the corner of her tray, but dammit, Jim, there should be some reaction. She shouldn't just sit there like some little golem. Even caged animals will batter themselves against the doors of their cage in search of escape and bare their fangs to defend themselves against the approaching hand before it grabs them by the scruff and drags them to perdition. They don't just lie down and die._

_They do when they've been well and truly broken,_ the morbid voice pointed out. _People like to say that spirits are resilient, and that might be so; God knows you've endured more than you ever thought you would or could. But resilient isn't a synonym for indestructible, and even elastic bands will snap when pulled too far for too long. Spirits and wills break just like bones. All you have to do is exert the proper pressure._

_You've seen it for yourself on the family farm, when you, your brother and your old man would collect the castoffs from neighboring farms. He still could in those days, before he got down one day and never got up again. The three of you used to trundle around in his old truck, your old man at the wheel and your brother in the passenger seat, all gangly limbs and untidy cowlick that he could never tame and you hunkered down in the bed with a padd on your knees. You told your old man you rode in the bed because it was easier to hitch and unhitch the livestock trailer, and there was a kernel of truth in that because your mother raised no liars, but you really rode in there because you liked the smell of sweet hay in your nostrils and warm metal at your back. And you could read back there, hunkered in the bed with your padd on your knees and the sun on your nape and the rattle and hum of the truck vibrating against your ass._

_He was no fool, your old man. He knew you were stretching the truth, pliant and forgiving as putty in your young hands, but he never made no never mind of it, let you hoard your harmless white lies the same way you hoarded your collection of replica pennies and your marbles. It was a shared secret, a wink and a nudge and a twinkle in his eye as he grunted and ruffled your hair and collected the warmth of the sun in the laugh lines in the corners of his mouth._

That's all right, then, son, _he'd say in that growling baritone so like your own._ Just settle in back there, and mind you see to your chores when we stop. _The reassuring weight of his leathery hand atop your head or pressed briefly between your shoulder blades, and then he'd clamber into the truck and crank the engine, and you'd glide down the road with the wind in your hair. They were good, those years, when the farm and your old man were hale and hearty and the nature of time seemed as boundless as your energy. They are some of your sweetest memories, the ones you hold closest to your heart. Maybe that's why you gave in, in the end, when that beseeching voice drifted out of the dark of that godforsaken airless room. Your old man always said that a man repaid his debts._

_You were as good as your word, too, never kept him waiting with your nose to the screen. You always hopped out of the bed and followed him to the stable or the pasture or the paddock to inspect the livestock. The air was fresh and clean in your lungs and heavy with the scent of horseflesh and sweet grass and hay rolled into bales and left to dot the landscape like pieces of a monument yet to be erected._

_You learned kindness at his hand and mercy, and how to judge the quality of animals and the men who tended them, valuable lessons all that have served you well through the years, but you also learned of broken spirits._

_Most of the men to whom your father took his trailer were good men looking to do a final kindness to an animal that had served them well. They rendered unto him dairy cows gone dry and once-prized thoroughbreds and quarterhorses that old age and use had fettered at last. They had foundered or gone swaybacked beneath the weight of daily toil, and now the farmer would see his reliable old friend to a life of ease and leisure in a foreign field. There were last scratches and final apples and sugar cubes pressed to velvety, nuzzling muzzles, and then George would lead them into the trailer with a lazy tug on the halter and soft whicks of encouragement while your father exchanged gossip and pleasantries with his brother in earth and soil and green, growing things. Sometimes you lingered on the periphery of the conversation, delighting in the laconic rumble of your old man's voice, the rough nap of it against your ears, but you usually wound up leaning on the fence, feet braced on the bottom slat and arms dangling over the top, and watching the other animals as they grazed, tails flicking indolently at the flies that buzzed around their flanks. If the paddock was empty, you followed George to the trailer and climbed onto the sideboard to peer through the small window at the horse or cow that had suddenly become yours. Sweet as the summer day unfolding above your head._

_But there were some--far more than there should have been in a just world--who had more wish than sense. They were city boys who fancied themselves men of salt and earth, and who persisted in the illusion to the detriment of everything around them. They set down sickly, tentative roots and raised a house and barn among the green, rolling hills. They bought a shovel and a plow and a tractor that never left the barn designed to looked weathered despite its newness, and then they gabbed and glad-handed their way into animals about which they had only read and for which they had no idea how to properly care. Then they styled themselves gentlemen farmers and blundered headlong into disaster._

_Times like that, you'd rattle into the barnyard in a cloud of dust, and your old man would spring from the cab of the truck with a nimbleness that belied his stocky frame. George would dart from the passenger side like a loyal hound, and you'd drop from the bed in a flurry of dust and hayseeds and chicken feed that danced in the air like misplaced fairy dust. The self-proclaimed farmer would shuffle forward in overalls that had scarcely seen the dust in which you stood, much less a hard day's toil of dirt and seed and mud and the fecund richness of shit smeared across the denim like woad. They were almost always young, these pretenders to a farmer's life, spot-faced and pale and too thin, plucked turkeys all eyes and fear and miserable embarrassment._

_It got so you could recognize the bad ones. Not always right off--sometimes it took a word or an uneasy sidle or downcast eyes--but certainly by the time you got to the barn. The bad ones never looked you in the eye, and their handshakes were limp and clammy and too quick. They talked too much and too loudly, and they avoided the topic of the animal you'd come to collect for as long as they could, until your father pushed the issue with sunny politeness and suggested they see the critter in question._

_If the farmer stalled further or moved like he'd filled his brogans with concrete, you knew. Your old man did, too, and though he never missed a beat, never dropped his air of chummy conviviality, his spine would stiffen beneath the fabric of his chambray shirt and a hint of steel would creep into his eyes._

Georgie, you bring the equipment now, _he'd say, and George would wheel a neat about face and go back to the truck. His head and torso would disappear into the truck, and when they reappeared a few moments later, his hands would be full of tack. And somewhere in the jumble of bridles and bits and ropes would be a small, black case. This he passed to your father, who took it as though it were the most natural thing in the world. As though every farmer carried a phaser when he went to inspect livestock._

_The sight of that case made your stomach roll and your heart thud dully inside a chest that had not yet begun to broaden with testosterone and impending manhood. It signified the end, a mercy of last resort. It made you feel sick and sad and hollow, and your throat and nose burned as though the swirling barnyard dust had found its way inside. Sometimes you stayed with the truck and scuffed lines in the dirt with the creased toes of your sneakers, keenly aware of the humidity on your skin and the prickling of the downy hairs on your forearms and the remote murmur of voices from the barn, but most of the time, you followed the others to the barn, driven by a compulsion to see the matter through._

_And oh, how you damned your relentless curiosity._

_You've never figured out why he let you follow him into those godforsaken places. Or George, either. There was nothing in them fit for a child's eyes, and your father wasn't a fool. He was firm but fair, and hardly oblivious to the lives of the children he'd brought into the world for the love of their mother. Indeed, he was doting in his fashion, quick with praise and compliments for a job well done and free with his counsel when your heart was troubled. You never wanted for a friend when you needed one, and when you graduated from med school with honors, there was no one prouder than him. He whooped when they called your name, and the hug he gave you after the ceremony lingered in your bones for days. The only thing he asked in return was the tassel from your mortarboard. It took pride of place in the living room until he grew too sick to hold court in his favorite chair, when it followed him into that airless room from which he never emerged. Your mother hung it from the mirror above the bureau opposite the four-poster bed into which he sank further every day, and there it remained until the day he died._

_Such a sentimental man should never have let his children see what they did in the backs of dirty barns and inside neglected, shit-heaped stables, but he did. It was a farmer's pragmatism, maybe, the realization that life was often hard and capricious, and dirty, and that to shield his sons from it would be to whisper an unconscionable lie into their trusting ears, and if that's so, then it's served its purpose. Those experiences prepared you for the grim years ahead, when you delivered a stillborn baby or raced to some remote farmhouse to oversee the last bloody, screaming moments of a farmer who'd gotten the hem of his pants caught in the gnashing teeth of his thresher. They held you together while everyone else came apart and let you make it to the damn car before the shakes set in and the nausea threatened to turn your guts inside out. Those barns and their terrible, pitiful contents were his perverse, unstinting gifts to the son who would be a doctor, and they have served you as faithfully as your dermal regenerators and your plasma scalpels and your legendary steady hands._

_They stank. God almighty, how they stank. You were too young then to recognize the stench, the high, sweet, oily stink of suppuration and disease-raddled fat, but you knew it wasn't a good smell. Nothing healthy smelled like that, like rot and damp hide and open cesspits fermenting in the sun. You would become intimately familiar with it as young doctor who carried his medkit into the homes of tough old saws too stubborn to call for help until the wife came screaming down the comlink with tales of fever and pus and skin gone green. It was gangrene and sepsis and wounds gone black to the bone. There was nothing you could do for then then but kill the pain and call for a med flight and keep the potential widow calm while she fluttered and wept and plied you with tea with hysterical civility. Occasionally, they survived, retrieved from the brink by a swift amputation and the miracle of modern medicine. Most times, they didn't, and more than a few of them rattled their last on kitchen floors and in marital beds that would never know the warmth of another embrace, while you watched the life bleed from their eyes and offered what feeble consolation you could to the newly-minted widow at your shoulder._

_But that was later. Then, you were just a skinny kid breathing through his mouth as he followed his father and older brother into a barn. It was yellow, that stink, old pork fat and boiled tallow, and your skin crawled even as your feet propelled you doggedly forward through drifts of dry, dead hay and beneath tools and tack that had never been touched. It was vicious and alive, and it clung to you with greasy tenacity. It seeped into your hair and pores and into the fabric of your clothes, and it followed you home, an unwanted hitchhiker in the bed of the truck. When you got home, you shed your clothes on the front porch and made a beeline for the tub and the strong borax soap your mother favored. She would save your clothes if she could, but sometimes no amount of scrubbing and maternal determination could conquer the evil reek, and your clothes vanished into the ether of the replicator. Most times, she just sighed and plucked another from that same replicator a few minutes later, a desultory magician pulling a lost rabbit from her hat, but every now and then, she sat down in her favorite rocker and sewed one herself, the needle flashing silver in the rosy light of dusk while katydids trilled in the grass and fireflies hovered in the tall rushes beside the creek and the moon rose in the sky. Those were as special as the rides you took in the back of your old man's truck, and you never wore them on any of these visits, lest the stink of corruption infect them, too._

_It was the bare-assed stupidity of it that galled you, the sheer fucking laziness. An ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, as the old saying went, and the idiots who led your old man into their barns at the eleventh hour and expected consolation and absolution for their folly hadn't invested in either. They had simply watched while an animal languished, rotting from the inside out for want of an ointment applied when the bite or cut was fresh. Cows contracted udder rot because carefully-manicured hands couldn't abide the slick of an antiseptic balm, and sheep were devoured alive by ticks and lice and parasites because the gentleman farmer knew nothing of shearing or worming or sheep dip. Dairy cows suffered agonizing mastitis from over-milking or the inexpert fumbling and tugging of unskilled hands or the poorly-calibrated, incessant suckling of machines, and breeding heifers struggled to calve until they collapsed and died and took the calf with them, or until the calf died in utero and poisoned her with its decomposition. Horses developed saddle sores that went untreated until the infection ate down to the bone. Sometimes, they developed colic and died in agony, foaming at the muzzle and pawing at the dirt in their filthy stalls while the cramps wracked their insides and they slowly suffocated beneath their own weight. They succumbed to lameness wrought by hoof rot that could have been avoided by routine visits from a decent farrier. They died simply because their minder was too lazy to give a damn about the creatures in his care, and the petty, dumb cruelty of it enraged you._

_Those barns were your first and best education in the ways of the world, and their lessons were harsher and clearer than those in your med-school textbooks, where the cold, ugly reality of death was sanitized and reduced to a handful of glossy photographs accompanied by didactic captions and a few dozen holographs of corpses and cadavers drained of all humanity as they lay on antiseptic steel slabs. Those photos and holographs and their dispassionate starkness were stories half-told, fairy tales made safe for naive, wide-eyed children, and they couldn't hold a candle to the truths laid out on beds of dirty hay. They said nothing of the sounds or the smells of death, the flailing, pawing, grasping futility of it. They also kept mum on the subject of dead, glassy eyes, and distended bellies and tongues gone blue and swollen from anoxia. And they most certainly said absolutely nothing about how long and hard life fought to survive from one breath to the next. Death was seldom peaceful. It was a knock-down drag-out fight badly and grudgingly lost. For most, it came too soon, but for some, it came too late._

_That was the hardest, truest lesson those barns had to teach. That sometimes death came long after it was called. Sometimes the spirit died long before the heart quit beating, and breathing was so much wind soughing through an empty conch shell. Horses with dead eyes would lie on the floor of their stalls, foam oozing from one end and shit from the other, and paw blindly at the dirt and the grimy wood of their hotbox tombs, their minds lost to the memory of rolling hills beneath their cracked hooves, and emaciated, flyblown heifers would lie in the dirt and chew imaginary cud while their eyes rolled wildly in their sockets and maggots crawled over weeping sores. They lacked the strength to rise from the matted mire of straw and blood and pus, and so they lay in it, too stunned and weak to cry out. The only sounds were their ragged, labored breathing as they drowned in their own fluids and the delirious, heat-haze buzzing of the fat-bellied flies as they circled their prey._

_And the shifting, dust-and-bone crunch of the straw beneath your feet as you stood with three men and watched the sorry spectacle._

_You didn't stay that first time. You turned so fast and hard that you damn near sprained your ankle, and the straw's breathless, contemptuous laughter followed you out as you lurched away from the smell and the blood and the shit-matted straw. You expected to hear your father's voice at your fleeing back, its disappointed reproof as stinging as a hickory lash, but it never came. Neither did your brother's mocking laughter. There was just the pained shuffle of feet and the quick, chirping burst of the phaser and a silence so still and complete that you wondered if you'd gone deaf, if the surge of bilious adrenaline had ruptured your eardrums._

_You made it to the truck before you surrendered the breakfast you'd gobbled so greedily that morning, with your mother humming at the skillet and your brother sneaking the dog a rasher of bacon beneath the table. You bent at the waist, hand braced on the side of the truck, and sent it all up in a wet, clotted splatter between your feet._

That's planter's work, there, _you thought with nonsensical pride as you blinked tears from your eyes and clutched feebly at your knee. Then your nostrils burned with the rich, fecund stink of shit and old blood, and your stomach revolted again._

_Your were still spitting bile and strings of sour bile into the the dirt when you heard approaching footsteps, the heavy clop of your old man's work boots, and you braced for the rebuke you expected, but all that came was the warm weight of your father's hand on the back of your neck. It was as familiar and comforting as the brush of Jack's fur against your hip as he loped into the kitchen to lap from his water dish, and you burst into tears, startled and ashamed._

It's all right, son. It's all right. _Your father's voice drifted over your head like a quilt, and his fingers brushed your trembling shoulder. There was dirt in the cuticles, just like always, and that bit of rightness in a world gone so rudely topsy-turvy was a relief. You spun and buried your face in the belly of his overalls and cried so hard it dizzied you. Your father only hummed, a stablehand soothing a spooked horse._ All right now, _he murmured and carded his broad, blunt fingers through your hair._ It had to be done, _he said softly, mistaking the reason for your tears, and you were too sick and grief-stricken to set him straight._

_He was right, but that didn't ease the metastatic ache of it as you climbed into the truck bed. There was no joy in the ride home that afternoon, just the dull, absent emptiness of an extracted tooth, and as the empty trailer rattled along the road like a funeral cortege, you swore you'd never come on one of these runs again. You slumped against the cab of the truck, knees drawn to your chest and padd forgotten at your hip. You were out of the truck the minute your old man tapped the brakes in the front yard, and you made a silent, drawn beeline for the screen door and the sanctuary of home._

_You waited for George to needle you for being a big old crybaby and barfing in a neighbor's yard, but he never did. Not that day, and not any other day. In fact, he was as peaked as you, and as quiet for once. Neither of you talked much the rest of that day; even your old man was uncharacteristically subdued, and your mother was so worried about her downcast menfolk that she bustled about feeling foreheads and inspecting gums and interrogating you about the state of your stomachs. She wasn't satisfied until she broke out her father's first-gen bioscanner, a hulking monstrosity that looked like a pepper mill and sounded like an asthmatic canary, and took everyone's vitals. She let you be once she figured out that she couldn't fix what ailed you with a motherly caress and a bowl of hot grits, but she kept a watchful eye on you and your brother until you both slipped off to bed, and you heard her hushed voice talking to your father long after night had settled over the house. You and George took turns petting Jack in the darkness of your shared room, and you fell asleep with a handful of German Shepherd scruff._

_You avoided the next few trips just like you'd intended when you'd come scissoring out of that barn with breakfast clogging your spasming gullet, but it wasn't long before you were scrabbling into the back of the truck again. You missed the sun on your skin and the wind in your hair and the hum and vibration of the engine beneath your ass, and you had your pride. You were damned if some miserable jackass with little sense and an even greater lack of conscience was going to rob you of time with your old man. Besides, you'd caught doctor fever by then, thanks to that bioscanner and the stories you heard at your maternal grandfather's knee, and you figured you had to toughen up if you were ever going to set bones and stitch wounds and treat weeping infections._

_So you went back. The first few times, you stopped in the dooryard, eyes closed and forehead resting against the sliding door and breathing slowly through your mouth to avoid the stench of blood and shit and spoiling sickness, but eventually, you bested your roiling stomach and rejoined the morose circle gathered around a creature sacrificed to some fool's ignorance. You were disgusted and filled with contempt for the wannabe farmers who bumbled and mumbled and sought to excuse their complicity in the sorry state of affairs that had brought your father there with his tack and his small, black holster, but you were curious, too, make no mistake. You were fascinated by the pink gleam of tendon and the dusty, porcelain whiteness of bone and the foggy milkiness of cataracted eyes. You wanted to know what eased pain, and why, and for how long, and you wanted to know why blood clotted and coagulated or separated into serum and plasma. You were captivated by the whys and wherefores of death even as you raged against the gracelessness and rank brutality of it, and you realized that to know these secrets, you must bear witness to the merciless mechanism of death._

_So you watched, and you learned from a teacher you despised and would gladly betray if you could. You never vomited again, never wept and clung to your father like a terrified foundling, but the miserable ache of loss and mute sympathy never faded. It remained, lodged behind your breastbone, hot and perpetually tender, and it drove you to excel in your studies and your early residency and your fledgling practice, when you worked until you lost fine motor control and lingered over every case late into the night, hunched over the desk crammed into your tiny bedroom while Pamela tossed fitfully in the bed behind you. Your obsession with thwarting death and its companions of misery and decrepitude and protracted illness consumed you and took your marriage with it._

_Pamela loved you when she said she would and did. You know that just as you know that doctoring is in your blood, but you also know it wasn't enough to counteract the resentment she held against your job and the voices that bubbled and crackled out of the com and summoned you from family reunions and cozy dinners for two. It was the child you never quite got around to having, and by the end, when she'd thrown you out of the house and you were sleeping on a table in one of your exam rooms because you were embarrassed to tell your mother that your marriage had collapsed, she loved it more than she loved you, and she nurtured it with a mother's single-minded ferocity. The only reason she isn't after you now is because she got everything worth taking when that Atlanta judge signed off on your divorce decree._

_Sometimes you wonder if she would have understood had she seen you all those years ago, when you were still becoming, still Len to your mother and Lenny to your brother and son to your father. If she had seen what you saw and heard the crackling of dead straw beneath her shuffling feet. You'd like to think so, like to believe that she was as good and sweet as your heart found her, but you doubt it. She might have felt that same righteous, impotent anger as she watched a young mare thrashing and snorting in the final, excruciating throes of colic, but she would have fled from it, ashen and stricken and shrilly defiant in her refusal to acknowledge the horror._

_You had no choice but to bear witness. You saw for the first time at eight and for the last time at twenty-two, the summer between college and med school, when you went home to help your old man on the farm. You saw dozens of creatures die on the floors of filthy barns, and as they passed from the world, they passed to you the recognition of surrender._

_You've seen it since. Only a few times, thank God for small, miserable favors, in the eyes of Gorn women who died in childbirth with their snapping, snarling offspring still struggling in the womb, and in the eyes of shuttle crash victims with compression injuries beyond the skill of even the most experienced surgeon and the most advanced technology._

_And in the eyes of a ravaged man in an airless room that stank of piss and despair and terror._

And there was a trail of breadcrumbs he most certainly would not be following.

_Fair enough,_ the voice conceded amiably. _I suppose I was getting a bit afield of where I wanted to go, and I'm sure we'll get there anyway in the end. All roads may lead to Rome, as the old saying goes, but all yours lead back to that farmhouse in Decatur, Georgia, and that airless, stinking room that could never seem to catch and hold the light._

_What I started to say so many words ago was that you've seen this before, and you know what it means and where it will lead if you don't cut it off at the pass. She's not past the point of no return yet, pawing at the dirt and waiting for that final breath with foam and blood on her lips and diseased hope in her eyes, but she's undeniably broken, bruised and battered and nursing wounds your bioscanners can't see. She's not seeking death with open arms, pursuing it in some twisted game of olly olly oxen free, but if it came for her in the night, she'd go with it without a whimper of protest or a pang of regret. Life isn't an adventure for her; it's a goddamned endurance contest, and her will is flagging._

_Yeah, well, I can't help her if she doesn't want it,_ he thought wearily, and massaged his eyes with his fingertips in a bid to thwart the headache that was blooming in a slow welter behind them. Then, _Dammit, it's treatment, not torture._

_To her, it's one and the same. You saw those tapes, saw what they did. Those weren't patients. They were captive specimens._

_That was two hundred and fifty years ago,_ he protested. _I'm not some mad scientist poking and prodding her on some wild goose chase and getting my jollies by seeing how much I can make her scream, for God's sake. I'm a highly-trained professional who knows what the hell he's doing._

_I'm sure the doctors on those tapes told themselves the same thing,_ the voice said, and there was no malice in it now, only cold pragmatism. _You'd be surprised what people tell themselves in order to justify their depravities and ease the sting of their grumbling consciences. Those idiot farmers did it often enough, when they left those hapless animals to a slow death on a grotty barn floor and called your father to clean up their unholy messes, and you've done it a time or two yourself in the name of science when you've injected some unsuspecting Tribble or rabbit with an experimental vaccine or a heretofore undocumented neurotoxin and recorded the results. Hell, you can be downright Vulcan when your precious profession calls for it. Just because Tribbles have no mouths doesn't mean they aren't screaming, and just because you're not stirring your patient's brains with a slim, metal rod doesn't mean it isn't torture._

_Besides, it's only been two hundred and fifty years for you. For her, it was yesterday afternoon._

One hour, then two, then three. Her charts were replaced by duty rosters and inventory calculations and requisition forms, and still she uttered not a word. She simply yawned and blinked and scissored her legs beneath the sheets. Lunch came courtesy of Nurse Ogawa, who set the plate on the rolling tray beside her bed.

"Thank you, ma'am," was her response. No more and no less. 

_Ma'am. Haven't heard that one in a while._ "Eat," he ordered gruffly. "And I want all of that water gone. You need to keep hydrated, ease the burden on your kidneys."

"The eating I can do," she replied, though she eyed the tray in front of her with no discernible enthusiasm. "But if I try to pick up that glass of water, I'm going to end up wearing it. It's too full. Do you have a straw?"

He grunted in acknowledgment and rose from his desk with a stifled groan at the knot of tension in the small of his back. He had been sitting for too long, and he stretched his calves and flexed his toes inside his shoes as he shuffled to the replicator and keyed in his request for a straw. "Rigid or flexible?" he called over his shoulder.

"Flexible, please. The rigid ones poke the roof of my mouth."

He finished the order, retrieved the straw the machine dutifully produced, and carried it to her bed, where he set it on the tray beside her plate. "Here. I mean it about that food, too. After all the upset yesterday, you need to eat, get your sugars up and your electrolytes in balance."

"Yes, Doctor."

Her arm snaked from beneath the coverlet, and her thin-fingered hand closed around the straw, which she handled as though it were fine bone china. Even with the aid of the Loxtan, her fingers trembled and twitched and threatened to close around the plastic stem like a throttling fist. His hands itched to pluck it from her unsteady grip and plop it into the water, but the analytical ruthlessness of the doctor whispered that it was a chance to assess her fine motor skills, so he quashed the charitable impulse by folding his arms and tucking his hands into his armpits.

_Might need to up the dosage a bit,_ he mused as he watched her hover the straw over the cup at a haphazard angle and release it from her crabbed fist like a steam shovel releasing its payload. The straw dropped into the water with a dainty plip. _The spasticity ramps up when she focuses on a task._

She planted her palms on either side of her hips and lifted her buttocks off the bed. She scooted backward a few inches and plopped into place, and then she leaned forward and pulled the cup toward her mouth. Her head bobbled drunkenly, and her neck stretched as she fought to bridge the gap between lips and straw, a tortoise emerging from its shell to reach for a tender shoot. Small, pink lips finally closed around the straw, and she took a long, convulsive swallow, one hand clamped around the edge of the tray to anchor her.

_Just getting out of bed must be the equivalent of a marathon,_ he thought incredulously as he watched her throat work and her abdominal muscles tighten with the effort of holding her upright and her knuckles whiten as she clung to the tray. _It might explain why she's so thin if she's burning so much energy just to take a swig. I might have to increase her caloric intake, at least for a while._

"Do you get hungry a lot?" he asked when she finally let go of the straw to take a breath.

She shrugged. "I used to when I was younger, but my doctors were always worried about me getting fat because of my 'sedentary lifestyle', so they kept me on a strict diet. Once I hit my calorie limit for the day, that was it. I went hungry a lot, but you get used to it after a while."

"Those doctors were idiots," he declared.

For a moment, the surprise on her face was so complete that he would have guffawed if he were not so appalled at such gross incompetence, but then the wariness returned. "My grandmother thought so, too. Every couple of weeks, she'd pick me up for a girls' day out and take me to the movies and dinner. I'd get to eat fried chicken and blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, and I'd get to have a Coke or a root beer once in a while. It was our little secret." She was quiet for a moment, and then she added, "It sure beat the hell out of my little secret." 

Her voice cracked and wavered, and he braced himself convinced that the breakdown for which he had been waiting had come at last, but she only took a deep, shuddering breath and loosened her death grip on the side of the rolling tray. "Sorry. I'm just..." She shrugged and offered him a bleak smile.

_She's a tough nut to crack,_ he thought as she squared her shoulders and took another greedy sip of water. _Good. She'll have to be._

"You're overwhelmed. It's to be expected under the circumstances," he answered.

Satisfied that she was following his order to drink her water, he made another trip to the replicator, this time for a bowl of grits with sawmill gravy and a glass of tea, unsweetened. While he wholeheartedly embraced his home state's love of grits, he despised its championed drink, a break from tradition that had earned him the labels of philistine and heretic, at least according to his brother, who loudly declared his distaste for liquid diabetes unnatural.

Well, George could keep his sweet tea. As far as he was concerned, it was saddle leather dipped in bee piss.

He carried his lunch to his desk and settled himself behind it. His spoon was halfway to his mouth when he realized that his sole patient was watching him again. Not with wariness and studied indifference, but with guarded curiosity and wistful longing. _Something's grabbed her attention._

"What?" His spoon hovered uncertainly below his chin, and grits crawled over its side and plopped into the bowl. 

God help him, she blushed to the roots of her hair. "I'm-it's-are those grits?" she stammered, and the blush deepened. She seized the sheets and wrung them nervously in her restless hands.

"As a matter of fact, they are," he answered, nonplussed, by the sudden shift in her demeanor. 

_Stay quiet,_ whispered the voice of instinct inside his head. _If you stay quiet, you might learn something._

So he waited. He swallowed the spoonful of grits and gathered another, skimming the surface with the side of the spoon until grits oozed into the center.

"I thought so," she said, so young and vulnerable that his heart dropped. "My Memaw Lavinia makes the best grits I've ever had. Smothered and covered. Thick, with sawmill gravy and sausage drippings and grated cheese. I could eat them by the bowlful." Nostalgic and fond. Then, like a stone dropped at the foot of a mountain. "Made. She made the best grits I've ever had."

What he saw then was homesickness, pure and simple, the crushing realization that she was a long way from where she wanted to be and might never get there again. There was no memaw here, no bowl of grits with all the fixings. No family to fill the silence of a house. Just a med bed little better than a cot and a nurse who brought her bland food at regular, monotonous intervals and a doctor who kept watch like a joyless warden and bid her pick her from unfamiliar poison.

_I'm sorry,_ he wanted to say, and he was. There was neither kindness or fairness in the hand she had been dealt. But there was no salve or nostrum he could give her to fix it, no balm to ease the angry throb of it. _Sorry_ was so much empty air between clacking teeth, as useless as a butterfly bandaid on a catastrophic avulsion. So he did not say it. Instead, he said, "I grew up on a dairy farm in Decatur. Grits were a breakfast staple all the time and an after-dinner belly warmer in the winter. No sawmill or cheese or sausage drippings. Just butter and black pepper."

A watery laugh. "The proper preparation of grits could be fighting words." 

She was crying, tears streaming down her face, and the sight of them brought a welcome relief. Tears meant grief, and a sorrow beyond the help of a physician's practical hands, but they were also a sign of acceptance, however reluctant and bitter on the tongue.

"Around my table, that went to tea."

A garbled squawk as amusement wrangled with loss and fathomless sadness. "Don't tell me you hate sweet tea?"

"All right, I won't."

"Philistine," came the reply, and it was so like George that he guffawed around a mouthful of grits.

She did not speak again for two spoonfuls and a sip of tea, and when she did, her voice was steady. "Earlier, you mentioned ideas for treatment."

"I did." Neutral and careful not to betray his excitement. A measured bite of grits.

"You said I could either leave in three weeks or a year."

"Yes," he agreed.

"Suppose I gave you six months. I don't know what you want to do, and I don't know if it will work. It could be just more quacking bullshit, but the way I figure it, I have nothing to lose. There's no money for you to bilk me out of, and my family is two hundred years in the ground. I'll give you six months."

"Why six?"

"Because sometimes the gains aren't worth the cost. If I get stronger or less spastic only to be too tired to do more than go to therapy and drool on myself in bed, then I want the right to stop. Life's more than doing. It's being, too, and if the only way to be who I am is to be this, then that's the way it is, and I'd like the chance to find my feet before you dump me off in some brave new world without so much as my wheelchair."

He considered. "Eight months."

She narrowed her eyes, and he feared that he had pressed too hard, traded too eagerly on their new and tenuous connection. "Fair enough."

He inhaled a celebratory bite of grits and narrowly resisted the impulse to leap from his chair.

"Now what?" she asked, lost and stunned by the conclusion of negotiations.

"Now we fill out paperwork."

She snorted. "Some things never change."

"No, they don't," he agreed, and pulled up the requisite consent and patient history forms on his padd, but before they embarked on a tedious afternoon of recording her every physical fault and foible, he ordered a second bowl of grits from the replicator, with sawmill gravy and sausage drippings and grated cheese, and set it on the edge of her tray.


	4. Eight-Month Hitch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last of the finished and fully-edited chapters. Updates will come more slowly at this point.

The good doctor was right, as it turned out. Two hundred and forty years after her last doctor visit, and not much had changed. There were still medical histories to take and forms to fill out, and the doctor still hunkered on his stool and examined her as though she were a priceless artifact. He held her soft-skinned, eggshell feet in his hands and scowled at the faint blue tinge to her flesh, and he poked the soles of her feet with needles to determine sensation and reflexes. He pursed his lips and rolled her ankles and her wrists, and he ordered her to lie back on the bed while he palmed her feet and pushed her knees toward her chest to determine range of motion. And like his predecessors, he stopped when she yelped at the pain of a ligament pushed past its limit.

"I take it that hurt?" he said. He held her sole in his warm, dry hand as it twitched in response to the pain in her knee, which was bent at an acute angle.

She nodded and bit her lip against the lingering throb in her ACL. "Just a bit."

"Describe it for me."

"About a second of red-hot sonofabitch." When he greeted that with blank incomprehension, she added. "It's like being stabbed with a hot fork."

He hummed and slowly lowered her leg to the bed. "I'd venture to guess they're not used to deep motion--squats, lunges, things like that." He picked up her other leg and repeated the process. "The right's better than the left, but that's not saying much." He pressed until he met resistance, and heat prickled beneath her skin as she braced for the sharp, serrated-glass sizzle. "Relax," he urged. "Tensing up will only make it hurt more."

"I know that, and you know that, but-" she began.

"But your nervous system doesn't give a damn, I know," he finished for her with the irascibility of habit, but there was no real heat in it. "Still, it would be in your best interest to take a deep breath and relax. "Can you feel your toes?"

"Of course."

"Concentrate on uncurling them for me. If you can get the piggies to stick their heads out of the poke, the rest of your muscles will follow."

She giggled, amused at his homespun turn of phrase. "You have a way with words, Doctor."

"I'm glad you appreciate it," he grunted. "Now, piggies in a poke."

She tittered again, and then she took a deep breath and willed herself to relax. She surveyed the doctor from behind long eyelashes as he loomed over her in his blue tunic. 

_That's a handsome one, isn't he?_ Grandma Lavinia noted slyly as the doctor braced her knee with his free hand and coaxed it upward another degree. _Lord, those cheekbones could give a woman the vapors. Probably cut paper, too._

She stifled a lecherous chortle at that, but she had to admit that her grandmother had a point. Dr. McCoy was handsome, his face unlined by the years of stress and long hours that came with his profession. There were no pouches beneath his eyes, no burst capillaries across the bridge of his nose that spoke of an uncomfortably intimate relationship with the bottle. No bloodshot eyes to hint at sleepless nights, no thinning hair or wattled skin. He was young and keen-eyed and lean beneath his tunic, and his hair was a rich, glossy brown beneath the lights.

_Either he hasn't been at this long, or doctoring is a lot less stressful in this crazy Buck Rogers future. Maybe there's not that much to worry about when you've cured cancer and have no reason to obsess over your IRA and your 401K and your malpractice insurance premiums._

"Do you have malpractice insurance?" she blurted, and was instantly mortified. _Smooth, Rosalie, real smooth,_ she berated herself as Dr. McCoy stiffened in surprise. _I'm sure he'll just love having his competence called into question again. While he's got your matchstick leg in his hands, no less._

As she expected, his eyes flashed with indignation. "Why?" he growled.

"It's just-" She shrugged helplessly. "You look young for a doctor. You don't have alcohol bloat or burst capillaries in your nose or wattles on your neck or the hangdog look of somebody who's been in surgery for seventeen hours and on call for seventy-two and like you're contemplating driving into a bridge abutment at sixty miles an hour to shut your nagging wife up," she gabbled. "And oh, my God, I'm going to shut up now," she muttered miserably, and lapsed into horrified silence. 

_Rosalie, honey, I think you've blown your chance to see if you could get those uncooperative knees of yours over his shoulders,_ her grandmother said dolefully, and she bit the inside of her cheek to quell an inappropriate bray of laughter.

McCoy blinked at her in gelid, inscrutable silence for so long that she fought the urge to squirm on the bed. "I'll take that as a compliment," he said at last. He incrementally increased the bend of her knee. "I studied at the University of Missouri," he went on. "First in my class in anatomical and forensic pathology. I joined on at various clinics after I graduated, but the old folks didn't trust a kid wet behind the ears. So I set out my own shingle near the farming community where I grew up. Tended to farm accidents and delivered babies, mostly, though I did assist on a few shuttle crashes. I don't know what qualifications you're looking for, ma'am, but I promise I know my way around a human body." He gently flexed her heel cord and hummed at the result. "And a few non-human ones, if that makes any difference."

He lowered her leg and slid his hands beneath her hips. "I'm going to rotate your hips. Tell me if and when it hurts, and do us both a favor and don't try to gut it out until the pain gets intense." He raised a hip and rolled it to the side, watching her face for a reaction. "Anything?"

She shook her head. "If it hurts, it's when I sit. My hips ache."

He held the position a moment longer and then returned her to center and rolled the other hip. "Mmm. Could be spasticity or contracture from sitting for prolonged periods, or it could be arthritis. Either way, we'll get it sorted out." He released her hips. "I'm going to check your spine. Just breathe and relax."

His hands slid along the knobs of her spine in a smooth stroke, and she nearly purred with the pleasure of it. Touch had been a rarity for her even before she had been relegated to the loveless cradle of the cryotube and even rarer without the barrier of latex gloves. Her family had touched her, of course, had smoothed her hair and patted her arms and legs in absent affection as they passed from one room to the next with dreams of freedom in their head and tugged her recalcitrant limbs into more photogenic positions and delivered careful, one-armed hugs. Once a week, a physical therapist had rubbed and chafed her legs with hands that smelled of baby powder and Jergens, but there had been precious little incidental contact. A nurse had routinely seized her arm to apply a blood pressure cuff with bored efficiency, but no cashier's fingers had brushed her palm as she passed the change, and no usher had ever pressed his fingers to her elbow to guide her to her seat. No one had brushed up against her on a tram or a city bus as it waddled across the city, though she had been awarded a spectacular and wholly unwanted panoramic view of her fellow passengers' asses as they swayed along with the bus as it rounded a curve. It had been surreal and queerly balletic, the opening steps to a synchronized dance of which she could never be a part, and she had experienced a stab of sullen envy as her chair had lunged and bucked against the grimy restraints and her head had tapped the window. 

No entanglement of toddler's fingers as they played patty cake, no butterfly tap atop her head for duck-duck goose, no linked arms in a game of Red Rover. No sweaty, competitive jostle of basketball or volleyball at P.E., no giggling, slaloming tangle of girl and too much lipstick and perfume as she headed out to the mall with her best friends alone for the first time, no coy exchange of handshakes and hugs and clandestine skin with a boy she had sneaked out to meet. No clumsy fumbling over a game of Spin the Blottle or Truth or Dare. No brush of bodies as she crowded into the backseat meant for four with five friends and a cooler stuffed with purloined booze for a freshman year roadtrip to Myrtle Beach, and no slap-and-tickle with the suntanned boys splashing in the shallows.

She had lived life on the sidelines and in the shadows, a spectator to the grand ebb and flow of life as it whirled around her. So often, she had longed to reach out and touch it, to feel the cool, goading rush of it beneath her fingers, tugging her onward and inviting her to join it. But the bracing hands of her therapists and the biting support of the parallel bars were as close as she could come, and so she had retreated into her history books, where with a little imagination, she could become anyone she chose and feel the solidity of the earth between her steady feet and the seductive rustle of linen and lace against her perfumed thigh. 

Only Grandma Lavinia had been freely and unrepentantly affectionate. When Rosalie was small and scuttling across the hardwood like a shucked crab, all pink flesh and warped bones and insatiable, four-year-old curiosity, she had swept in with a flourish and a happy, twittering cry and swept her up as she pawed at her knees like an exuberant pup.

 _There's my favorite little rose,_ she would cry as she cradled twitching limbs gone akimbo and held her close. She had smelled of cold cream and silk scarf and grandma, and she had wiggled in delight as she had swayed to and fro and spun her in a wide circle, suspending her for an instant in defiance of gravity. It was the closest she would ever come to flying, and she had thrown her head back and loosed an exultant shriek to the high-vaulted heavens, much to the chagrin of her mother, who would grimace around her sip of sweet tea.

 _You shouldn't get her wound up, Mama,_ she would say. _I'll never get her settled down later._

 _Oh, now, everybody needs a little fun, don't they?_ Grandma would say, and give her a conspiratorial wink, and they would giggle at their shared hubris.

No hard wheelchair cushions on those visits, just the snug comfort of Grandma's lap as she settled them into her favorite wicker chair in the kitchen or onto the sofa in the parlor, where Mama entertained guests with a stream of polished chatter and slices of the best pecan pie in three counties. Grandmama's manicured nails scratching idly at her back and the dazzle of her fuschia blouses and wispy scarves in her eyes and the lulling rhythm of her breathing in her ears while sunlight streamed through the windows. Grandmama's lap was was home.

Time and age had stolen that from her, too, but not Grandma Lavinia. When she had grown too big and too old for her lap and too heavy to swing from her arms, Grandma Lavinia had made sure to pull her wheelchair parallel to her seat and rest a soft hand on her forearm. While her stronger, more rambunctious cousins roughhoused at her feet on the living room floor, playing army and scattering plastic soldiers over a make-believe battlefield, Grandma had hummed to herself and praised their antics, and then she had leaned over and whispered, _You're still my favorite_ into her ear.

She had learned about the monthlies from her when she was twelve years old, wide-eyed and morbidly fascinated as she had learned the dirty little secrets of a woman's life, and when she was a few years older, as much of a woman as her obdurate, uncomely body would let her become, Grandma had taken her boy-watching down at Centennial Park. She would post herself on one of the wrought-iron benches that lined the lazily-looping brick path and pull her little rose up beside her, and they would pass the time by admiring the young men who passed in their suits and ties and gutterpunk t-shirts and worn Converse.

 _Frankly, honey, I don't know what you see in that one,_ she would say disdainfully as Rosalie surreptitiously ogled the slim, toned calves of a skater boy with hair blond as summer wheat. _Oh, he's pretty enough, I suppose, but I'd wager he's got about as much ambition as your Uncle Beau's blue ticks. They aren't much good if they've got nothing to offer you outside of the sack. Trust me on that, sweetpea. I'm not saying those kind can't be fun for a spell, but sooner or later, backs give out and those firm backsides start looking like your great-aunt Tallie's jell-o molds. Then you're stuck with 'em, and you've got nothing to show it but their incessant whining and a down and dirty itch they can't scratch anymore. It's a miserable predicament to find yourself in._

When Rosalie would sputter at her in disbelieving incredulity, shocked to hear her ordinarily-proper grandmother speaking with such vulgar frankness, her grandmother would only laugh and pat her bony knee. _Oh, don't be so scandalized, sugar. You'll find out for yourself soon enough. Now there,_ she would say, alert as a sparrow behind the blocky shades she wore to protect her eyes from the sun, _you want a fellow like that._ And she would point a discreet finger at some dark-haired lad with a suit and tie and a faux-leather briefcase swinging jauntily from his hand. Hair slicked and neatly parted and shoes on his tender feet shined to a spit polish.

 _But what if he's bad at it? In the sack, I mean?_ she had asked once as their quarry had passed with a flap of tie and a swing of his briefcase, and Grandma had nearly laughed herself sick, doubled over on the bench with her hand clapped to the top of her head to keep her wide-brimmed straw hat from tumbling off her head and cartwheeling down the path like a tumbleweed.

 _Oh, honey,_ she had said when she had regained her composure. She had uttered a watery cackle and swiped at her streaming eyes with the back of her hand. _There are ways around that easy enough. I'll show you some when the time comes,_ she had promised, and they had held hands and watched the possibilities roll by in the shade of an old elm.

She had made good on that promise two years later, during spring break her freshman year at UGA. While most of her classmates had gone to drink and fuck and burn on the beaches of Panama City, Grandma Lavinia had turned up in the driveway in a rented conversion van with a temperamental lift and hauled her and an aide promised triple the normal rate to New Orleans. She could still remember the flutter of her grandmother's hair in the wind as they rolled down the interstate with the windows down and the burn of the vinyl upholstery against the backs of their legs. The attendant had hunkered in the backseat, flanked by the electric wheelchair as it rattled restively in its aging restraints, and she had smelled of Big Red and old cheese, a sullen, brooding inmate bound for Angola and not one of the liveliest cities and bawdiest streets in the world.

But the joyless attendant was irrelevant now, insignificant white noise in her vivid memory. What mattered was the city, rising slowly from the mud and debris of Hurricane Katrina, proud despite her bruises and scars, and the time spent with a grandmother that was now long gone. What mattered was the laughter and the torpid heat that had sucked the air from her lungs and settled in them like warm reservoir water, the hedonistic laughter of shitfaced tourists as they reeled and slalomed down Bourbon Street, and the jazz that wafted from the clubs and rose from the streetcorners like sweet hash smoke. 

_They said thank you with their eyes,_ she thought idly as the doctor's probing fingers catalogued her vertebrae. _A slow blink as you dropped a crumpled bill into an open saxophone case or rusty, tin cup. They never missed a note, never quieted that ceaseless, mournful cry, muffled wails behind a velvet curtain._

What mattered was jouncing over the cracked and pitted cobbles that ran through the red light district and the taciturn attendant muscling her heavy chair up the single step and into the dim interior of the sex shop. It had smelled of incense and latex and silicone, and she had been so startled by the wares on display that the collared clerk must have thought her either a simpleton or a hopeless prude, but her grandmother had chortled with delight and shooed the attendant outside and bid her browse to her heart's content.

_Honey, nobody in here cares what strikes your fancy, so long as the money's good. Besides, this city's got plenty of secrets of its own._

She had been right, as she so often was. The clerk had not so much as blinked as she had shyly pushed her choices across the counter with her ears burning beneath her hair like banked embers. She had simply bagged them as neatly as you please and told her to have a nice day in a patois thick and strong as blackstrap molasses, and had gone back to her magazine before the door had finished closing behind them. 

What mattered were truths she had discovered within the bag. There had been no midnight fumbling sessions in the backseat of her father's Escalade, no tipsy groping in linen closets at weekend house parties. No awkward first fuck beneath a magnolia tree, with cheap wine on her teeth and grass and sweat in the crack of her ass. Her first pleasure had come at the caress of her own fingers when she was fourteen, and she had surrendered her maidenhead to the dildo she had found in that sweatbox sex shop just off Bourbon Street. Its touch, so rude and intrusive and coldly mechanical, had awakened both desire and curiosity and stoked a hunger she could never fully satisfy with its carefully-molded length.

If it could not grant her warmth and intimacy, then at least it had prepared her well for the sloppy, brutish advances of the frat boys who had seen her as a novelty to be tested or a kink to be explored, a story to be shared over beers at the next kegger. No gentle hands or sweet swords whispered in her ear. Just impatient grunting as they tugged on her panties and pushed up her blouse and wrestled with her trembling, spasming thighs. Rough hands bruised her skin and coarse whiskers left razor burn on her face and neck, and when they were finished and staggering as they tucked themselves away, she had lain atop the rumpled, musty sheets in an indelicate sprawl, too sore and spastic to move. They had blinked at her in owlish stupefaction, as though she were an error already rued, and left her with muttered farewells that carried the yeasty stink of booze and quiet loathing.

For her part, she had waited until the door had closed behind them, and then she had struggled into her clothes as best she could and levered herself into her wheelchair. There could be no secrecy in her departure, not with the chair beneath her skinny shanks. Eyes alight with mockery and prurient curiosity had followed her progress as she had crept toward the door with her gaze fixed on the narrow path in front of her. 

_No shame,_ she had always admonished herself as conversation had faded like stilled wind. _No shame in this. You have as much right to a good fuck as the cheerleaders and the sorority sisters and the Southern belles hiding their loveliness behind pencil skirts and tortoiseshell eyeglasses._ But there was always shame, part and parcel of the sour sweat drying on her skin and the drying come crusting on her strained thighs and threatening to glue her to the upholstery of her seat; shame and a sinking suspicion that she had sold herself too cheaply to a lover less deserving than the silicone cock that had been her first. There had been no fire in it, no mutual passion, no sense of connection beyond the slick, undulating join of their bodies, but it had been better than nothing, better than the prospect of spinsterhood, and so she had taken what she could from those who would give it and willed it to be sufficient.

Even with the drunkards and the slumming dickheads and the desperate nerds who called it a pity fuck and an act of nonconformist philanthropy, her opportunities had been few and seldom satisfying. Even if her partner awarded her with an inadvertent orgasm in pursuit of a unique notch for his bedpost, neither her heart nor her mind were likewise enflamed. It was an experiment dispassionately observed and unsuccessfully concluded, and whenever she heard her classmates and compatriots rhapsodizing about the glories of a good lay, she could only listen with envious ears and wonder what she was missing.

 _Something tells me this young doctor could show you,_ her grandmother said slyly, her voice so clear and true in her mind that her chest cramped with longing.

His hands were warm and firm upon her back. There was nothing indecent in them, no hint of impropriety, and yet she found them soothing. There was a gentleness behind his careful efficiency, a suppleness that made her muscles relax into his touch. His fingers reached the top of her spine and interlaced to cradle her neck, and she purred when he slowly turned her head first one way and then the other.

He raised an eyebrow. "There anything I should know?"

"I'm fine," she murmured, and ignored the heat that bloomed on her nape. "It's just..." She shrugged helplessly. It's just been a while, that's all."

He waited for her to elaborate, and when she did not, he grunted. "I'm going to sit you up now." He slipped his arm behind her shoulders and curled his other hand around her furthermost calf. "Ready? On three. One, two, three."

He sat her up and swung her legs over the side of the bed in one fluid motion, and when she swayed and threatened to topple headlong into his chest, he steadied her with a hand on her shoulder. "Let me know when you can sit on your own." He scooped his bioscanner from a nearby tray with practiced ease and conducted a brief scan.

"I'm good," she said once she had found her elusive center of gravity and anchored herself by curling her hands around the edge of the bed in a vise grip.

"Uh huh," he replied, and dubiously released his hold. When she did not crumple bonelessly to the floor in an untidy sprawl of tangled limbs and bloodied nose, he stepped back and seated himself on his stool. "Your trunk control will get better, too, if you stick to the regimen I have in mind." He placed his palms beneath her bare feet. "Push down for me as hard as you can," he ordered. "Don't strain."

She dutifully obeyed. The skin of his palms was a pleasant friction against the soles of her feet, and her toys splayed and curled at the unexpected sensation. Her heels rose of their own accord, the nervous prance of a skittish foal, and she waited for the inevitable clucking rebuke, but it never came. He merely jotted a note into his tablet with his stylus. When he was finished, he released her feet.

"Did I pass?"

"It's not an either/or test," he answered. "You did well enough, but I'd like to see it better."

 _Of course you would. Your kind always do._ "If I bring up my grades, do I win some shoes?"

"We can get you some shortly. The replicator's working through a backlog at the moment. I'd also like to get you into some AFOs."

She groaned. "Those damn things are still around?" she asked plaintively. "Just how advanced is this so-called advanced medicine of yours again?"

"Sorry to disappoint, but like I said, some things don't change. Those happen to be one of them."

"Please tell me they're at least breathable now," she whined. "They make my feet smell like old cheese and rancid gym socks."

The good doctor absorbed that tidbit with serene equanimity. "Well, luckily for the both of us, designs have improved since the last time you had a pair."

"Thank God for that," she muttered drily, and was surprised to see a flicker of amusement in his eyes.

He heel-walked his stool across the room to a bank of neatly-labeled drawers. He opened one in the center, withdrew a slender, black object the length and width of a mechanical pencil, and returned to her bedside.

"Another updated syringe?" she asked as he uncapped its tip, and resigned herself to another jab.

"This," he said as he toggled a slider switch on the pencil's side, "is a three-dimensional scanner." As he spoke, her leg was surrounded by a wash of soft, blue light. "It'll make a mold of your legs, which the replicator will use to create your AFOs."

"Huh. I guess there have been some improvements, after all. It sure beats plastic tubing and cold plaster that rips out most of your leg hair when they peel it off." She fought the impulse to wiggle her toes as the light passed over them.

She was mesmerized by the elegant sweep of the light over her pale flesh. _It should be cool,_ she thought as it lapped between her toes and rose to cover her calves and nip at the backs of her knees. _Like light reflected on snow or the soft, liquid fall of a silk evening gown over the sensuous curve of a socialite's hip, but it's not. It just is, like the reflections that dance on the ceiling of an indoor swimming pool. It would be like slipping the tips of my fingers inside a mirror._

She was so absorbed in the play of the light over her skin that she jumped when it vanished, abruptly snuffed by a click of the slider. Balance deserted her, and she floundered precariously on the edge of the bed.

Dr. McCoy's hand shot out to steady her. "Helluva startle reflex."

"Sorry. It's always been pretty bad." When he dropped his buttressing hand from her shoulder, she said, "So, what's next on this thrilling foray into twenty-fourth-century medicine?"

"Another throwback, one that sure will thrill you as much as the others. I'd like to give you some tests to gauge your mental aptitude."

"To prove I'm neither an imbecile nor a psychopath, in other words."

He shifted uncomfortably. "Well, yeah," he admitted apologetically. "It's standard procedure."

"Lead on, then."

"First, I want to give you a tour of our facilities, give you an idea of what you can expect."

"You have facilities?" She looked down the long row of beds that lined the walls and saw no therapy equipment stowed in unobtrusive corners, no balance balls stuffed into cubbyholes like packets of illicit contraband. There were only grey walls and cupboard stocked will pills, bandages, and pipettes.

"Sickbay is actually a small complex of rooms." He gestured to a door behind and to the left of his desk. "My office is through there." He pointed to a set of doors she had not noticed before, halfway down the aisle. "The doors on the right lead to intensive care, the OR, and cold storage. The doors on the left lead to our OT and PT rooms. That's where you'll be doing most of your work."

"Let me guess: it's full of mats, light hand weights, balance balls, parallel bars, and hand cycles."

"Mats and weights and balance balls, yes," he agreed. "But the parallel bars and handcycles will have to be hauled out of storage, assuming they weren't sucked into space when that damn Romulan blew up half of sickbay or obliterated when Admiral Marcus lost his fool mind and tried to blast us to kingdom come. If they were, I guess that's one more job for the replicator."

She gaped at him with rising alarm. "Wait, wait, wait. Someone blew up half of sickbay and another lunatic tried to blow you up? Am I on a warship in the middle of Armageddon? Because if I am, I don't think it's exactly the place to commit to long-term rehab. I thought you were an exploratory vessel." She hunched her shoulders and cast a wary glance around the room, as though she expected a gun-wielding soldier to leap from a hidden compartment in the walls or slither from beneath the bed.

"It's been a rough few years," he said, and she could only sputter at him,

He abandoned his stool and stretched to his full height. "I wouldn't worry. Odds are good that we've seen the worst of it." He considered a moment. "Of course, I thought that last year," he muttered darkly. "And the year before that."

"How comforting."

"Sorry." He tossed his three-dimensional scanner onto his desk. "Can you sit here while I find you some med socks and a wheelchair, or do I need to lie you back down?"

"I'll be fine as long as there aren't any sudden noises."

A skeptical cluck from the back of his throat, but he left her there and strode to the door on the left.

"Do I at least get a helmet and a flak jacket if it all goes to hell?" she called after him as he disappeared into the adjoining room."

"Trust me sweetheart," came the faint reply. "If it goes to hell, I'll be right here, knee-deep in casualties. "Besides, death by violence is rare on a starship. You're more likely to die from a hull breach or catastrophic warp core failure."

"Once again, you prove yourself a comfort, Doctor," she answered dourly.

Another pause as he weighed her words for insult. "Death in both cases would be instantaneous," he offered as though such knowledge were a salve against creeping horror.

He emerged, pushing a manual wheelchair the likes of which she had never seen. Oh it was spare and boxy and boasted a sagging seat that promised hours of discomfort and ungainly indignity as her scrawny ass sank lower and lower in its flimsy depths, but it was also completely translucent, window glass and spun sugar.

"Is that plastic?" she marveled.

He scoffed. "No. It's a carbon fiber three times stronger than titanium but light as cardboard. It can bear loads of up to six hundred pounds. It's durable, too. Won't crack or fracture on impact, and the wheels are designed to reduce palmar friction."

He sounded so much like a proud, eager salesman that she grinned. "Have they fixed the problem of warped rims and broken spokes?"

"The spokes are made from the same material as the frame, so you'd have to really work for any damage or breakage." He plucked the spoke and gave it a vigorous tug to illustrate his point, and she was surprised to find that she missed the musical ping of a spoke in true. "As for warping, I can't say it's impossible since they aren't usually used long enough to test it, but according to the manual, they can be easily balanced." He parked the chair at an angle and set the brakes. Then, he swung the footrests to the side. 

"I'm not sure how you normally transfer."

"From a bed to the chair? I usually don't. The attendants did the heavy lifting."

"Well, we don't have attendants here, and while I could temporarily assign a nurse, I'd rather you do it yourself if you can."

"If I can't?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." He stood in front of her and held out his arms, bent at the elbows. "Show me."

She reluctantly pried her fingers from the edge of the bed and braced herself on his shoulder, and then she wiggled her hips from side to side until her shanks were nearly off the bed. She bent and gripped the forearm of his opposite arm, and then she took a deep breath and dropped off the bed.

Her feet, unaccustomed to weight bearing, promptly began to ache, a dull, bruised throb that radiated into her calves and threatened to cramp her stringy hamstrings.

Dr. McCoy gently extricated his forearm from her vise-like grip and dropped his hand to her hip. "Put your hand on my shoulder," he ordered. When she did, he applied firm, stabilizing pressure to her misaligned hip and spun her around so that she hovered over the wheelchair seat. "Sit."

She plopped gracelessly into the sling, breathless and with her splayed feet smarting and akimbo on the footplates. _Christ almighty, but I'm out of shape,_ she thought dismally as her legs jittered with exhaustion.

"We'll work on your form," the doctor said not unkindly. "For now, it's a win that you made it in one piece."

"Now you're being generous," she said, and squirmed to adjust herself into a more upright position. "The bed's higher than I'm used to, but I'd be lying if I said that had much to do with it. I feel eighty." She huffed in irritation and squirmed more, the points of her elbows digging into the armrests as she dragged her buttocks backward by force of will.

"Since you're technically two hundred and sixty years, I'd say you're ahead of the curve," he said drily.

The unexpected humor surprised her, and she uttered a reedy wheeze of laughter.

"I can lower the bed a bit, and a handrail might help. There won't always be a nurse around."

"This chair's too big," she pointed out, and hated herself for being a font of endless complaints. The doctor was just as much out of his element as she was, and needling and nagging him about each new inconvenience she found in this bizarre brave new world would hardly ensure his continued goodwill. 

"It is," he agreed. "It's also the only kind I've got right now. Once I get a better read on your abilities, limitations, and overall condition, I can design one to meet your needs, but I won't know what they are until you follow me and let me do my job." There was no heat in it, no rebuke or righteous indignation, only bald fact, but she felt chastened all the same, and she fought the ridiculous impulse to hang her head and mumble an apology to her toes, which had curled on themselves like frightened fieldmice.

"Let me get these med socks on you before I show you the PT room." He dropped into a crouch in front of her and unrolled a pair of socks. "Pick a foot." He held out a sock.

She thrust a foot at him, and it was immediately enveloped by snug warmth.

"It's going to be awkward for both of us for a while," he said quietly as his nimble fingers chafed her newly-socked foot. "I'm not ashamed to say I'm a damn good doctor, but nothing in my med school textbooks prepared me for this. I'm working blind here, and I'm going to need a little patience while I figure things out." He lowered her foot to the footplate with exquisite care and picked up the other sock.

"I know it's a lot to ask given everything that must be going through your head right now. If you believe us, you're a time-traveler two hundred and forty years in the future and nothing is how you remember it or where you left it. If you don't-" He shook out the sock and slipped it onto her waiting foot, Prince Charming presenting his boon to a wasted Cinderella. "-then we're all lunatics and nothing is still where you left it or how you remember it. It's a mess either way. You may think I'm a lunatic, but I'm a lunatic who's trying to help you. Whether it's enough or not isn't for me to say, but I'm doing the best I can."

"Why do you care?" she asked as he finished with her foot and set it into place on the footplate.

"Because it's my job," he answered as though it were the most obvious truth in the world.

She snorted. "Please. If you were just doing the bare minimum your job required, you would've stopped with the preliminary physical and the first round of blood draws, made sure someone brought me a tray of swill when the clock said so, and fobbed me off on the first underling who didn't look like they were going to quit or keel over if someone dropped another brick on their load. You would've told me to shut it the first time I complained and ignored everything that came out of my mouth that wasn't simpering gratitude. And you certainly wouldn't be rubbing my cold, ugly feet."

He regarded her from his crouch. "I don't know how they ran things back then, Miss Walker, but half-assed doesn't pass muster on this ship, especially not in this sickbay. As long as you're here, you're under my care, and I'll be damned if you'll leave it worse than when you came to it. Now, when you've gotten yourself situated, follow me into the PT room." He dusted his hands on the knees of his pants and rose from his crouch, and then he turned and marched toward the PT room.

She could only gape after him.

 _Oh, honey, I do believe this one has some fire to him,_ her grandmother observed. _This could be interesting._

She closed her mouth and collected herself and followed him down the aisle. As she suspected the chair was too deep and too wide, a behemoth that swallowed her up, but it was impossibly light, like riding a feather on the wind. She was soon on his heels, so close that she could hear the shift and rustle of his clothes as he moved. She could smell him, too, clean skin and shaving cream and starched fabric. It was a remarkably human smell in an otherwise sterile environment, and she savored it as they passed through the doors and into the room beyond.

And there ended her momentary buoyancy, because the doctor was right; some things never changed, and the PT room, it seemed, was one of them. It held the same array of equipment designed to push, pull, stretch and bludgeon her body into grudging compliance with a world that had neither the place nor the patience for it. There were the same drab mats and blank walls, the same stinging, medicinal smell, camphor and rubber mats and disinfectant to wash away the meaner stink of agonized bodies writhing in pursuit of acceptable imperfection, and over it all hung an air of oppressive melancholy and wasted breath. 

_I can't,_ she thought suddenly as she stared at objects terrible in their familiarity. _No matter where I go or what I do, this is all my life will ever be, a series of rooms and schedules and therapy sessions. If anyone ever wanted to take a measure of my life, it would be a series of charts and fucking timesheets and medical diagrams. I can't do this, not again. Please, God, don't ask me to do this again._ She curled her fingers around the rims of her wheels to keep her arms from wrapping around her in a protective embrace. 

_And what would you do if not this?_ asked a pitiless voice inside her head. _Travel the world? Lock yourself in an ivory tower with your books and your moldering treatises and primary sources crumbling into inconsequential dust? Indulge in an epic love affair and set up house in some quaint little villa by the sea, with an adoring husband and a pair of rambunctious children at your feet?_

_You always did have a febrile imagination. The world you knew is the stuff of legend and lore, a fairy tale whispered to disbelieving children by amiable drunks and dotty aunts. Who can say what it looks like now? Maybe mankind has been driven beneath the earth to live in labyrinthine caves and on terraformed seabeds. Even Dr. McCoy, for all his grumbling compassion, admits that people like you were so kindly obliterated by modern medicine. If that's true, then the world has no need of ramps and handrails and accessible doorways. You would be as helpless as a fish out of water, and just as useful._

_Your precious ivory tower would be out of reach, too, barred, not only by winding staircases that ascended into the heavens, but by obsolescence. That degree of which you were so proud is so much faded ink and brittle lambskin by now, two hundred and forty years out of date. Besides, Daniel probably used it for kindling the minute you went into the can._

The thought of her younger brother inspired grief and a dull, festering anger, and her muscles seized with the urge to double over with her chin on her knees, but McCoy was eyeing her with mounting suspicion, and so she breathed through her nose and past the cramp massed in the center of her chest and pretended to be fascinated by a row of weights on a nearby table.

 _Don't you pay that voice any mind,_ Grandma Lavinia said sharply. _As long as you're living, you've got a fighting chance. You can always learn what you don't know and go from there. All it takes is a little gumption, and that's one thing you've never lacked, my little rose. And don't you listen to his foolishness about Daniel, either. He loved you._

The voice chuckled, leather braces dragging through sucking river mud. _Please,_ it said. _Who's spinning fictions now, Lavinia Peabody Walker? I thought you prided yourself on your honesty,_ it needled, and clucked in feigned disappointment. _Then again, I suppose love makes hypocrites of us all. Daniel might have loved her when he was still in short pants and easily enthralled by her lively bouts of storytelling, when she'd get so excited by the task and swept up in the moment that she'd wobble in her chair and rock back and forth like a hobbyhorse. Hell, what kid wouldn't be excited to have an amusement park ride for a sister?_

_Sure, he loved her, but he loved Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too, and those old DVDs of Barney and Sesame Street, but then he grew up, and love died. That's the thing they don't tell you about love, those prattling, long-winded poets. It changes. It waxes and wanes, ebbs and flows, and sometimes--more often than folks would care admit--it curdles, rancid and noxious as spoiled milk._

_Nonsense and poison,_ her grandmother interrupted. _And don't you believe a word of it._

 _Hardly, and you know it. If it were, then divorce lawyers wouldn't be the fattest worms in the dirt. Love is as fickle a flame as the minder who tends it, and most folks aren't exactly wielding the eternal flame. If they were, then you'd be carrying the last name of some hayseed Georgia farmboy who left you nothing but a stain on your dress and a warmth on your thigh and a handful of photos in an old album. John Peabody wasn't the first to win your heart. He was just the last eligible man standing when you got tired of giving it away, and isn't_ that _the very definition of romance, my, my, my. That story should be a Lifetime movie, shouldn't it?_

 _You've always been a smart girl, Rosalie, I'll give you that,_ the voice said, unfazed by her grandmother's impertinent interruption. _You've always been able to sense the bullshit even if you couldn't avoid swimming in it. So, tell me: do you think me a liar, twisting the knife for my own sadistic pleasure, or am I just the only one willing to speak the truth you've felt in your bones for a long time?_

Her grandmother drew herself up to speak, but the voice was faster, a scalpel slicing through undefended flesh. _You can blow wind until it comes out both ends, but there isn't a platitude or nugget of homespun wisdom you can spout that will change the fact that Daniel wasn't there when they pulled your precious little red rose from the earth and plunged her into a frozen, eternal night._

She waited for a rebuttal from her grandmother, staunch and fervent and stinging as a lash, but there was only silence, ringing and vast and final, and the voice chuckled with satisfaction.

_The truth is more faithful than love, more constant, and it will outlast all your mule-necked memaw's heartsick defenses. Pride won't will your brother into that room between your parents or erase the last words he ever said to you, and even the most potent grandmother's love can't change history._

_As for your notions of a grand love affair, well, you can put them to bed right next to the past of wishful thinking. The great summer of your life is long past, when you were sixteen and flexible and still possessed of the idealistic hope that the best was still ahead for you. Now you're thirty and jaded and stiffer than ever, and while the doctors might not be as cold and draconian as you remember, not as eager to inflict pain in the name of pragmatism and progress, the equipment in here is proof that the world below this spaceship is the same. You are still a charity case, a problem to be solved by clever hands and potent poisons and just enough human interaction to keep you alive. As far as they're concerned, survival is a suitable substitute for happiness, and if it isn't, well, that's too bad. No one on this ship is going to look at you with anything other than curiosity and pity and the miserable, furtive gratitude that they're not you. You might've surrendered your worthless cherry to some slobbering frat boy before it shriveled between your spastic legs, but your heart will never ride in someone else's hands._

_This is what you are and all you will ever be, an experiment to be poked and prodded and painstakingly recorded in a doctor's medical file long on terminology and diagnoses and short on blood and tears and thwarted, caged humanity. You're a tool, Rosalie, a hothouse flower forever trapped beyond the reach of the sun and cursed by God to know what could have been if He'd been a little kinder or taken a little more time when He drew your form in its patch of sacred earth. Stop reaching for a sun you'll never touch and let nature take its course. Let Dr. McCoy takes his notes and record his stats and mark your insignificant progress, and when the time is up and he's as disappointed and disillusioned as the others, maybe he'll have the compassion to let you turn your face from a light that offers no warmth and sleep forever._

_I should've breathed in the fluid,_ she thought dully. _Before the anesthesia paralyzed me and sent me under, I should've taken a gulp. One breath is all it would've taken. Just one, and I would've drowned, if not immediately, then when the pneumonia set in and turned my lungs into waterlogged, bacterial sponges._

 _Yes, you should have,_ the voice agreed, the low murmur of a mother soothing her feverish child. _But it's too late now. God's twisted little rose has been transplanted into a new hothouse, and there's no one to dig you up and carry you home, to resettle you into the familiar soil of home. You're own your own now, and you have no choice but to endure._

"Not much has changed here, either, I see," she said, thin and strengthless and impossibly tired.

She expected Dr. McCoy to show off his timeless, state-of-the-art equipment and bore her with an explanation of its uses, but instead, he said, "Come on. Let's get you back into sickbay proper and start those tests I mentioned." His eyes were dark, almost black in their intensity as they surveyed her face, and behind the clinical curiosity of a surgeon assessing a critical wound were confusion and concern.

 _Sense the infection, do you, Doctor?_ she thought cynically as she met his gaze. _Then you're sharper than most. Most don't see past the fact that my ass is parallel to the ground. Don't waste your time trying to reach it, though. No one ever does, and you couldn't fight it if you did. If you killed it, you'd kill me, too._

She offered him a bloodless grin and let him lead her back to the main ward.

She was still bloodless and grave as Dr. McCoy sat behind his desk and watched her pore over the test he had set before her. He could see the tension in her hunched shoulders as she pecked grimly at the virtual keyboard on her desk, fingers stiff and priapic as they jabbed at letters he could not see. Though the Loxtan he had given her had relaxed her considerably and allowed greater range of motion and freedom of movement, the cords in her neck still strained and bulged grotesquely with every keystroke. Every now and then, she was spurred to frenetic activity, the tapping of her fingers a frenzied, sloppy timpani that reminded him of an arrhythmic heart, and color would rise in her cheeks, hectic and alarming and utterly fascinating. Part of him wanted to stop her, abort the test and order her to bed, but he let her be. There was no signs of distress beyond the high color in her cheeks, and the ruthless scientist in him wanted to know just what kind of engine she was running under her mangled hood.

 _A better one than people think, I'd wager,_ his father said, and he could see him in his mind's eye, rawboned and hardy and thoughtful beneath the wide brim of his hat.

 _No doubt there,_ he answered easily, and he was back home on the family porch in Decatur, ass parked in a rocker his father had carved himself and feet propped on the porch railing. _I've seen stupid, and she isn't. But I'm not sure she's quite right, either._

 _No,_ his father agreed. _No, she isn't._

It was not danger he sensed, or simmering psychopathy that would reveal itself in a gaudy explosion of violence and chaos, nor was it the serene amorality of a sociopath. It was subtler, the bitter resignation of a prisoner without hope of pardon or freedom. 

_The walking wounded._ His father nodded sagely and rocked in his chair, and the runners creaked companionably on the worn, whitewashed boards of the porch. _Somewhere along the way, someone's fetched her a blow from which she's never recovered. They sank it deep, too, hit something vital. Who knows when it happened? A while, maybe. Old wounds sometimes hurt the worst, and even after they scar over, they can throb and flare when you least expect it._

_It's a big one, Dad. The biggest I've ever seen, and deep, too. I have a feeling I'm only looking at the surface._

_Just take it slow, son. One step and one stitch at a time. The size of the wound doesn't matter if you keep at it._

She grimaced and shifted and drummed doggedly on the keyboard. She scowled at the screen, pinched and pale and pensive in the reflected light.

"It won't determine the rest of your life," he said mildly. "It's just to get a baseline."

She answered without looking at him. "You're not the only one who doesn't half-ass it, Dr. McCoy." Tap-tap-tap went her fingers in their inscrutable, palsied code, and there it was again, a glimpse of the person behind the latticework of scars and bruises and bones badly-mended.

"All the same, take a break if you need it. This isn't timed. And remember to drink your water."

She heaved a sigh and ceased her tapping, and then she straightened with a muffled groan, hands clenched into fists. "Damn chair," she grumbled, and pushed away from the table. She rolled to the tray at the end of her bed, and a splay-fingered hand shot out to grab the half-empty glass of water she had left there. She fastened her lips around the straw and took several long, convulsive sips. When she was satisfied, she set the cup on the tray again and gazed at him with innocent expectancy. "Better?"

"There's no need to be such a damn smartass," he groused, and crossed his arms.

She startled him with an eruption of laughter. She threw back her head and let her amusement fly, and years of care and unhappiness fell away. She was young, if not lovely, and her broad, white smile brightened her wan face.

"Thank you, Doctor," she said, eyes alive with merriment, and then she spun the chair with a snap of her slender wrists and returned to her testing carrell. As soon as she set the brakes, solemnity settled over her like a mourning shawl. The flicker of life in her eyes guttered and died, and she became a creature of reflex and singular purpose. Fingers to keys and confessions to paper. 

_Answer the questions and show me your soul,_ he thought darkly as the minutes passed and the curve of her spine deepened and the clack and clatter of the keys took on the timbre of nails driven into sanctified wood.

On and on she wrote, page after page of thoughts he could not see. She wrote through the shift change at fifteen hundred, an inexhaustible little drummer girl who played Nurse Bellwether right out the door, and she outlasted his bladder and his maddening curiosity and two more glasses of water. She scarcely blinked as she worked, and she sometimes hummed and rocked in her seat, moved by the intricate dance of her fingers.

"Are you recreating the Magna Carta?" he demanded irritably when the hour neared seventeen hundred and she still had not finished.

She stopped then, and when she turned her head, her eyes were opaque glass inside their sockets, as blank as ancient statuary that had not seen the sun in a thousand years. "I'm just singing for my supper, Dr. McCoy," she said flatly, and gooseflesh rippled on his arms and puckered the flesh of his thighs inside his uniform pants.

 _I'm looking straight at the wound now, aren't I?_ he thought, mouth dry and flesh too snug around his bones.

 _Yep,_ his father said, and there was neither warmth nor ease in him now. He dropped his booted feet from the porch railing with a heavy clop and sat ramrod straight in his rocker, keen eyes fixed on a point on the distant horizon. It was the look he got when one of the horses pulled up lame on a trot around the paddock or the dairy cows dried up before their time. _And I still think you're seeing naught but the surface._

Well, _there_ was a comforting thought. He shifted in his seat and masked his unease by coughing behind his loosely-fisted hand.

She watched him in dispassionate silence and offered a knowing, humorless twist of her thin lips.

"At this rate, I'd say you're about to sing yourself hoarse," he replied, unnerved by her gelid, reptilian gaze, an alligator surveying him from the murky, concealing depths of its bayou. "Just give me what you've got."

"Yes, Doctor," came the polite reply. "Do I need to press any keys?"

"No, I got it. You just...take a break," he finished lamely. 

She released her brakes and pulled away, and when she was at a respectful distance, he slid into the carrel. He entered his access code and transferred her test file to his padd, and then he powered down the terminal.

"You'll be on your own for a while," he told her. "There are nurses if you need anything."

"And if I want to get back into bed?"

He blinked at her, momentarily nonplussed, and looked at the bed. Then, realization dawned. It was still to high for her to safely transfer. "I'll have one of the nurses adjust it, but I don't want you in it for a few hours. You need to be up and about, get your body back into rhythm."

"What can I do to while away the hours? This place doesn't strike me as an entertainment hotbed."

"We'll see about getting you a padd." He held up his own. "But it might take a while because-"

"Because the replicators are backlogged," she finished for him.

 _Nothing wrong with her recall,_ he noted wryly. "In the meantime, you can look out the window." He tucked his padd under his arm and crossed to the window opposite her bed. "The view doesn't change much, but it's something." He pressed a button on the side panel, and the shade covering the window withdrew to reveal the vast, cold blackness beyond. "If you think you're going to be sick, for God's sake, don't decorate my sickbay with your stomach contents. There are some sick bowls on the tray behind you." 

He hesitated, racking his brain for words of wisdom or comfort that would draw her from her pinched, round-shouldered melancholy, but he could think of nothing that would penetrate the cold, shuttered blankness of her eyes, and so he gave her a last searching look and left her to gaze upon the yawning emptiness of the final frontier.

He was still unsettled ten minutes later as he listened to Spock droning on about roster rotations and minor conduct infractions committed by overzealous ensigns and bored yeomen and surreptitiously scrolled through Rosalie Walker's test beneath the long, abetting edge of the conference table.

"-suggest more stringent penalties for such carousing in the future," he said piously.

Jim simply smirked and fiddled idly with his tab. "Such as?"

"Perhaps a few hours in the brig would be sufficient."

"A few hours in the brig for a bit of horseplay?" Scotty said incredulously. "It's a ship, not a penal colony, and there's no faster way to destroy morale than to become a lot of smothering, joyless tightarses."

"Discipline is not an unpleasant imposition, Mr. Scott, it is a necessity, especially on a starship with limited space and resources."

"Discipline, sure, but there's a fine line between it and draconian tyranny."

"You are overstating the situation," Spock retorted blandly. "I'm suggesting temporary confinement, not public flogging.

"Well, thank God for that," Scotty shot back, and his dry tone was so like Rosalie Walker that he looked up from his pad.

"I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Spock on that," Jim said.

"Thank you, Captain," Spock said pompously, and straightened in his chair.

 _If I didn't know better, I'd say he was gloating,_ McCoy thought, amused.

His triumph was short-lived, however. "I'd hardly call basic discipline an unbearable tyranny, Mr. Scott." Jim spun his padd in a lazy circle, and Scotty slouched in his seat, fuming. "That being said, I think a stint in the brig for a bout of ill-advised roughhousing is excessive."

"There. You see? A man with sense," Scotty declared, and gestured at Jim with enthusiastic grandiloquence.

"May I point out that Captain Kirk has, in the past, demonstrated little respect for the rules and regulations of Starfleet and has, in fact, elected to disregard both chain of command and the Prime Directive."

"That decision saved your life, dammit," McCoy snapped indignantly.

"A fact of which I am well aware, Doctor," Spock answered coolly, and McCoy was seized with the unbecoming impulse to cuff him about the pointy ears. 

"Then you could try being just a little bit grateful." He tightened his grip on his padd beneath the table and wished for a glass of whiskey.

"I assure you that I am grateful, Doctor," Spock said, unfazed by his rising irritation. "But my gratitude for the eventual outcome of that decision does not change that fact that the Federation's first and most inviolable rule was flagrantly broken to the probable detriment of a developing civilization."

"A civilization that would've been obliterated otherwise," McCoy pointed out. 

"A most regrettable consequence, but perhaps one that was meant to be."

McCoy sputtered at him. "'Meant to be'" he repeated. "Don't tell me that you're abandoning your vaunted Vulcan logic in favor of some mystical belief in fate and ultimate destiny."

Spock cocked an eyebrow at him. "Not at all. In fact, leaving the Niburu to the whims of its volcano would have been the most logical and prudent course of action."

 _Because it's just so easy to stand by and record the extermination of an entire civilization like it's some goddamned holonovel._ He opened his mouth to resume the ethical duel, but before he could fire his scathing rebuttal, Jim raised his palm to forestall further discussion.

"We've covered this ground before," Jim reminded them with the weary patience of the long-suffering. "I see no point in going over it again. As far as the yeomen go, a verbal reprimand should be sufficient. If it isn't, we'll revisit the situation." Before Spock could protest the pronouncement, Jim turned to Uhura, who sat beside Spock. "Lieutenant Uhura, have we received any new orders from Starfleet?"

She shook her head. "No, sir. Our only scheduled assignment is our check on Ceti Alpha V."

The captain stiffened imperceptibly. Ceti Alpha V was the planet on which they had exiled Khan and his followers after the crazy bastard had tried to single-handedly bring down the Federation, destroy the _Enterprise_ , and had managed to reduce Starfleet headquarters and the Academy to piles of smoldering rubble and mangled bodies. The Academy and headquarters and their surrounding environs had been rebuilt, but the loss of life had been enormous, and Starfleet and the Federation had a vested interest in keeping tabs on Khan and his movements.

"When is that scheduled?" The slowly-twirling padd had stilled. 

Uhura consulted her padd. "Five weeks, sir."

"Which means that at our current speed, we should set course for Ceti Alpha V within four weeks," Spock supplied.

Jim nodded. "Any reason we shouldn't make it, Mr. Scott?"

"No, Captain. She's purring like a kitten."

"Good. What about you, Bones?" Jim swiveled his chair to face him. "Any medical crises to report?"

"I've dispensed a few hangover cures, but other than that, the only patient in my sickbay is Miss Walker."

"Our hitchhiker."

"My patient," he corrected.

"And?"

"Her name is Rosalie Walker. She's thirty years old, and according to the tests I've conducted, she has Cerebral Palsy."

"I am unfamiliar with that condition, Doctor," Spock said with his customary detachment, but McCoy saw the glint of curiosity in his eye and the sudden attentiveness of his posture. He sat forward in his chair and tented his elbows on the table. Uhura, too, was intrigued. She set her padd on the table, nimble fingers poised over the screen as though to take notes. Scotty continued in his amiable sprawl, but his eyes were focused inside his face.

"That's because it was last seen in 2179, when the last known sufferer died. Medical advancements in the early twenty-second century eradicated it. She's a piece of living medical history, Jim."

"Does her condition present any danger to the ship or its crew?" Spock asked, as if she were a particularly virulent pathogen

He scoffed. "No. It's congenital and neurological with concomittant orthopedic factors. The only danger she presents is to the finish on the door to the head. Damn wheelchairs don't fit."

"How does she seem otherwise?" Jim tapped the stylus of his padd on the table.

He shrugged. "She doesn't talk much other than to complain, but she listens, and as far as I can tell, she hasn't lied about her medical history, which is rare." He eyed Jim, who offered him a roguish, cocksure grin.

"Have you conducted a psychological evaluation?" Spock again, officious as ever.

McCoy rolled his eyes. "I know how to do my job. Yes, I performed a psych eval, and a standard intelligence test."

"And?"

 _And kiss my ass, you green-blooded hobgoblin,_ he thought churlishly, and interlaced his fingers on the table. "Her psych eval shows nothing abnormal. She's withdrawn and mistrustful and confused, but that's normal for a situation like this. She might show anger in the next few days, but that's normal, too. I expect the wariness to improve once she feels comfortable in her surroundings. The confusion and anger might take a little longer."

 _A lot longer in the case of the anger,_ he thought. _I think that's been there a hell of a lot longer than the past few days._

"Is she stable enough to move?" Spock inquired.

"Move?" McCoy repeated blankly. "She can't walk. Her feet are the density of eggshells, and the rest of her bones are riddled with moderate osteoporosis. One wrong move, and she could be the proud owener of multiple stress fractures. I've started the treatments, but it's going to take some time."

"You misunderstand, Doctor. I was inquiring as to whether she could be transferred to the nearest starbase."

"Transferred to the nearest starbase?" he echoed, and Christ, he sounded like a broken record. "My God, man, she's a human being, not a hunk of freight. You can't just wake her up, tell her everything she's ever known is gone, and drop her off with a hearty clap on the back and a good luck."

"Still, the facilities on the starbase would be better equipped to deal with her needs."

"How would you know? You haven't so much as poked your head in sickbay since we brought her in," he countered furiously. "Besides, the doctors there won't have the slightest idea what they're dealing with."

"Neither do you," Spock retorted with implacable calm and irrefutable logic.

"Maybe not," he conceded. "But I know more than anyone has in nearly one hundred years, and I've got the time. The wards on a starbase are busy and full of people with contagious diseases she's never been exposed to. According to her antibody panels, she needs at least a dozen vaccinations, all of which have the potential for side effects and adverse reactions. If she goes to a starbase, they'll adminster them in a cluster or all at once, upping the risk of a reaction. Here, I can administer them individually and monitor their effects. This disability hasn't been seen in years, and no one knows what might happen if a vaccination goes bad. Including me," he said before Spock could interrupt to point out the obvious once more. "But I can have eyes on her twenty-four-seven."

"What about your research and experiments?" Jim asked.

"I can still do them. Like I said, she's not much of a talker, and aside from the occasional trip to the bathroom, she doesn't ask for anything. I've designed a program of medications and therapy to start correcting the issues I can, and she's agreed to commit to the program. Stretching and light aerobics and hydrotherapy coupled with a regimen of Loxtan." 

"You obtained her consent?" It was Spock's turn to sound dumbfounded, or as close as a Vulcan could get, anyway.

"Don't sound so surprised, Spock. I'm not an ogre." He passed his padd to Jim, who perused the consent form with pursed lips.

"On whose authority did you make such an agreement?" Spock demanded.

"On my authority as a doctor," he snapped. "She needs treatment, Spock, and I offered it. It's part of my oath as a doctor.

"As a Starfleet officer, your ability to fulfill your oath is constrained by your responsibilities to Starfleet and your subordination to the chain of command."

"The hell it is."

"As such," Spock went on as though he had not spoken, "And as she is an alien-"

"She's not an alien!"

"She might be human, Doctor, but she is not a citizen of the Federation. The cryogenics facility in which she was stored attempted to move its clients to a satellite location on the moon just before the outbreak of the nuclear war that destroyed much of Earth's civilization and infrastructure. However, the transport shuttle was struck by asteroid fragments and suffered a catastrophic hull breach. The cryotubes were ejected in the subsequent explosion, and most of them incinerated upon re-entry into the upper atmosphere. The remains of two tubes were discovered on the banks of Lake Michigan. They contained only ash and a few bone fragments. Since most tubes were incinerated, there was no way of knowing who might have survived. When no survivors turned up within a few days of the crash, it was presumed that the entire shipment had been lost."

"Except for Miss Walker's," Jim supplied, though his eyes were still scanning the contents of McCoy's padd.

"Clearly. But investigators at the time presumed her dead as well."

"Meaning she has no Federation ID number," McCoy said dully.

"She does not," Spock confirmed. "As far as the Federation is concerned, she does not exist."

"But how did her cryotube survive when the others didn't?" Scotty mused, and scratched behind his ear.

"Unknown. It is possible that her cryotube was nearest the breach and was therefore thrown clear of the explosion by the force of suction. If hers were the first tube ejected, it might have escaped the blast radius and drifted through space for the next one hundred years."

"Until our sensors picked it up," Jim murmured absently, his gaze still fixed on the padd screen in front of him.

 _You're not reading the consent form anymore,_ McCoy thought as Jim's expression shifted. _I thought the same thing when I first read it, damn near walked into the wall._

"As she is not a recognized citizen of the Federation, you should have consulted-"

"Is this her intelligence test?" Jim interrupted Spock's impending discourse on proper intake protocols and held up McCoy's padd.

"Part of it. She was still trying to work on it when I called time on account of the meeting."

"Still working? Christ, Bones, I didn't write this much on my Academy entrance exam."

 _Well, you weren't exactly a model student, Jim. The only covers you cracked were the ones on your bed._ "She's thorough, yes."

"Thorough? There's got to be sixty pages here."

"Seventy-five." He had counted on the turbolift. "And she never got to the final question."

"May I see, Captain?" Spock held out his hand, and Jim passed him the padd. After a moment, he said, "These results are most impressive. The doctor is correct in his assessment of her as thorough. Indeed, her level of detail borders on the obsessive."

"Coming from you, I suppose that's a compliment," McCoy replied peevishly.

The pointy-eared bastard had a point, though. It _was_ obsessive. It was also meticulous and exceedingly well-organized with citations and footnotes and cross references; that these were two centuries out of date and drawn from texts that had long fallen into disuse or out of favor was irrelevant. It was an historical treatise that would put most academics to shame.

 _And its existence calls into question a long-held belief in medical history,_ observed a professorial voice inside his head that reminded him of his xenobiology instructor, a sparse, angular man with a voice cool and dry as talcum powder. _We have always believed that those born with congenital defects of the nervous system were also afflicted with inferior intellects. Delays, we called them in our magnanimous, enlightened kindness; our more ruthless predecessors called it retardation, Whatever the name, the meaning was the same. They were human, yes, but lesser, and to be pitied. A fortunate few might approach normal intelligence, might become happy, productive members of society, but most were limited to a sheltered, unenviable existence in discreet institutions and family homes._

_But this shows us for liars and short-sighted fools, and it makes you wonder what else she's hiding in that head of hers._

_Imagine the paper you could write,_ whispered the voice of ambition. _It could change our perceptions of ancient medicine and shape the way we treat patients with neurological disorders. The historical implications alone are staggering, and not just from a medical aspect. Historians would be salivating at her firsthand accounts. So would sociologists, for that matter. She's a treasure trove of the past, and people would kill for even a glimpse of what she knows._

"While this is most fascinating, the fact remains that we are an exploratory vessel that may encounter dangerous situations and hostile species. In the event of an emergency, we are unprepared to deal with her needs. It would be better for all involved if she were transferred to a starbase, where conflict is far less likely."

"Less likely, but not impossible. The Klingons have been known to blow up a starbase. So have the Cardassians. And if some crazed admiral decides to target our ship again, we're going to be knee-deep in crew members with 'special needs'. Are you saying we should just jettison them, too? I know that deserting the inconvenient is your standard operating procedure, but my conscience tends to balk at abandonment."

"If you are referring to the incident with the Captain on Delta Vega, you might recall that I was emotionally compromised at the time."

"Fine. What's your excuse now?"

Jim blinked at his sudden vehemence. "If you don't mind me asking, Bones, why are you so invested in this? Is it really because she's a twentieth-century medical marvel?"

He thought of her terror as she emerged from the anesthesia into the drab, mechanical world of a starship sickbay, and of the fragile longing in her voice when she spoke of home and her grandmother's grits with sawmill gravy and sausage drippings. He thought the way her expression had collapsed when she had stepped into the therapy room and realized that her future bore a haunting, bitter resemblance to her past. He had thought--hoped--that the dam would break then and she would cry out the rage and the loss and the fear she could not articulate, but she had regained her equilibrium at the last moment, a plummeting gymnast making a hail-Mary grab for the bar just beyond her skimming fingertips. She had zipped herself up at neat as you please and told him what she thought he wanted to hear, and then she had dutifully followed him back to the sheltering bunker of the testing carrel, where she had hidden until the sting of this latest blow had faded to comfortable numbness.

 _I'm just singing for my supper, Dr. McCoy,_ she said inside his head, pale and stoic in her chair, and he suspected that she had been doing just that for a very long time, baring her myriad flaws to curious eyes in exchange for a place at the table, no matter how mean and cramped. It had been a fleeting glimpse of the festering wound hidden beneath layers of impenetrable armor.

He thought of her startling, inexplicable laughter at his fit of pique, and of a boy in a standing box and dragging himself through parallel bars with exhaustion on his face and weights of steel and leather on his feet. He thought of thoroughbreds strangling on their own fluids and pawing feebly at the damp, fetid earth of their stalls, and of farmers averting their gazes from the horrors their neglect had wrought.

He thought of his brother retrieving his father's phaser from the cab of truck.

He thought of the writing on his padd, coaxed from the keyboard by palsied, uncooperative fingers and possessed of a spare, often stunning beauty.

He thought of a room that stank of piss and rot and festering rage, and of a voice drifting out of the dark. _Please, son. Please._

"Please, Jim." No logic now, only an entreaty, an appeal to their friendship. "I know I can do this. I just need time. She trusts me. It's tentative, but I can work with it. If you ship her off to a starbase, there's no guarantee she'll follow the regimen I've suggested."

"Do what, Doctor?" Spock's voice, intrusive as the buzzing of a fly, and equally inconsequential.

"Jim," he pleaded. "Please. She deserves a chance."

_C'mon, Jim, c'mon. I've followed you down every crazy road you've ever started, most of them against my better judgment. I've never complained, and I've never asked for a damn thing in return. Just give me this._

"All right, Bones," he said at length. "She stays, but she's your responsibility, and if at any time she becomes an impediment to the safety of this ship or its smooth operation, she goes to the nearest starbase. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." Jim offered him a sunny grin and turned back to the rest of the table. "Now, what's next on the docket?" he asked, and for the rest of the meeting, McCoy was content to drift on the comfortable hum of his voice.


	5. Mile Marker One

Her mouth was full of lightly-buttered toast when the doctor swept in the next morning, crisp in his blue tunic and black pants. He tossed his tablet onto his desk and swept a scanner from the nearest tray.

"Eat light this morning," he advised as she chewed. "Assuming your vitals haven't gone wonky overnight, we'll be starting part of your therapy regimen this morning."

 _You're certainly not one for wasting time, Doctor._ "Part?" she echoed when she'd swallowed and washed it down with a sip of watery, bitter orange juice. She wiped her fingers on her napkin.

"If I tried anything other than light stretching right now, you'd either wind up in traction or give yourself palpitations. You said yourself your stamina's shot." He waved the scanner over her with the jaded elan of an old magician.

"So did you," she pointed out. "And they still have traction these days?"

"Not really," he grunted, gaze fixed on the readouts from his musical salt shaker. "We have neuroskeletal regenerators for that now."

"Of course you do." She waited until he lowered his scanner and lunged over her tray for another bite of toast. Her knees rose beneath the coverlet, trembling spasmodically, and her toes fanned and curled. 

The doctor's eyes slid from the readout, inscrutable and assessing beneath thick, brown lashes. He promptly exchanged his scanner for a hypo. "I take it you haven't had your Loxtan yet."

She shook her head. "Just the kidney pills and the bone supplement."

He strode to the bank of locked drawers on the opposite side of the room, keyed in his code, and pulled open a drawer to retrieve a large ampoule of blue liquid. He closed the drawer with a tap of his hip and re-engaged the security locks. He returned to her side, loading the hypo as he came, and she tugged down the neck of the scrubs that served as her wardrobe these days and presented her neck.

His lips twitched as he pressed the hypo to her pulsepoint. "I see you've conquered your fear of the hypo."

She shrugged. "It's kinder than the needle. My little brother used to flick me harder than that when he wanted to be a little bastard."

"You had a brother?" Pleasant and curious, but the _had_ stung, the scrape of ground glass against her skin.

She nodded. "Daniel," she said. "His name is--was--Daniel." She grimaced as a microscopic shard buried itself behind her breastbone. "He was four years younger." She blinked at the crumbs of toast scattered on her tray. Dr. McCoy said nothing, but she could see him from the corner of her eyes, the sharp spar of his wristbone protruding from the vivid blue of his tunic.

 _He has lovely hands, elegant,_ she thought inanely. Then, stupidly, _If he weren't a surgeon, he'd make a fine pianist._

An image arose in her mind of Dr. McCoy seated upon a piano bench in front of a black Steinway polished to a high gloss, the coattails of his tailored tuxedo draped over the edge like somber bunting. Nimble fingers flew over ebony keys, and his lean, muscled legs pumped the pedals as he followed the exultant flight of his hands. His ghostly reflection in the piano's flawless, obsidian surface was haughty and patrician and handsome, the high cheekbones sharp even at a dim remove.

 _Honey, you don't even know if he can carry a tune in a bucket,_ Grandmama Lavinia piped up, and the Steinway abandoned the opulent confines of the concert hall for the far humbler and snugger confines of a ten-gallon bucket carried by a muttering Dr. McCoy as he stomped down the street, sweating and straining beneath the weight of his improbable burden, coattails flapping briskly with every step. 

The image was so absurd that she could only ponder it in mute befuddlement, but it provided a welcome distraction from the stirring of old bones she had no desire to examine too closely, and she was grateful for it. 

_Leave it to Grandmama to make it better,_ she thought, and bit her lower lip to stifle the urge to weep. 

She twisted the coverlet in her hands and cleared her throat. "So," she said hoarsely. "Am I fit for duty?"

"Physically, yeah," he answered, and eyed her with mounting suspicion.

"Good." She scrubbed her prickling nostrils to ease the insistent, cayenne-pepper itch. When he merely eyed her in dubious silence, she offered, "Thinking about my brother just stirred up some old ghosts, that's all." She shook her head as though to rattle them loose. "They're like dust, they get everywhere."

He snorted at that, but didn't press the issue. Instead, he snagged the footplate of her wheelchair with one sneakered foot and dragged it closer to the bed. "Well, when you're finished with the housekeeping, get yourself into Therapy Room One." He nodded in the direction of the room he'd shown her the day before.

"No time like the present," she said, and pushed the rolling tray and the sad remnants of her breakfast away.

He held out his arm. "Use my forearm to pull yourself up and brace if you need to. A hernia on the first morning'll throw one helluva wrench in the works."

"Thanks for the show of faith, Doctor," she groused, but it was so much bluster.

The doctor withdrew his arm and folded it across his chest. "Oh, really? Well, feel free to prove me wrong," he demanded.

"I could try, but it would only end in sweat and tears," she admitted sheepishly, and threw back the cover.

"'S what I thought," he retorted with grim satisfaction, and held out his arm again.

She grabbed it with both hands and pulled herself forward, a rower bent to the till of a trireme. Despite the Loxtan coursing through her system, her legs trembled with exertion.

"For God's sake, don't give yourself a stroke," McCoy ordered irascibly when she wheezed. His free arm came up to support her back, and she sagged gratefully against it. "Let go." When she did, he curled his hand around her far leg and swept it around in a fluid motion. With the other hand, he steadied and straightened her wobbling trunk.

"You're good at this," she said when she'd found her balance and was gripping the edge of the bed with both hands. Her socked feet dangled bonelessly above the floor, and she stared at her toes in an effort to hide the embarrassment that warmed her cheeks and nape.

 _Helpless as a newborn,_ she chided herself. She wondered what all the old therapists who had poured thousands of hours into her as a child and young girl would think if they could see her now, floundering and weak and able to hold herself upright only by dint of the doctor's bracing arm.

"Had a lot of practice," the doctor answered.

"Medical school?"

"Drunks at the Academy, mostly," he said, and she was so surprised by his candor that she guffawed and nearly toppled off the bed.

The doctor's hand shot out to steady her. "Gonna have to have engineering lay down a rubber floor in here," he muttered, but his hand was light and gentle on her shoulder.

"Sorry," she told her socks. Inside the thick, warming cotton, her toes splayed and twitched.

"Stop talking to your toes, Miss Walker." When she raised her gaze, his eyes were resolute inside his face. "And stop apologizing. Save it for when you've got something worth apologizing for. You're on day one. I don't expect you to be turning somersaults. What I do expect is for you to try. As long as you do that, we'll be just fine."

She studied him, keenly aware of the warmth of his hand on her rounded shoulder. "I can do that," she agreed. "I'll do whatever you ask of me. Just...don't yell at me, and be patient with these creaky old bones and obstinate muscles."

"I'm not one for yelling at my patients. As for patience, I'm not going to coddle you. I expect you to work, and hard. If you want to get into shape and have a chance to live your own life, it's going to be a hard road. Maybe a long one, too. You'll sweat. You'll hurt. And sometimes you might think I'm a bastard. But I'm not a sadist. I'm not going to ask you do something I don't think you can. And if what I ask you to do hurts now, it's only because it'll hurt less later."

 _You're different,_ she thought as her eyes began to burn, and she shifted in his supporting grip. _I've been the child of a thousand different doctors, but you're the first one who's ever told me the truth. Hell, you're the first one to ever talk to me at all. The others always talked to Mama or Daddy. Even when I got old enough to know my own mind, they just patted me on the head and told me not to worry myself about it, as though I were still a child. And since my parents were footing the bills, what they said went nine times out of ten, and when it didn't, it was only because the doctor had another regimen or surgery in mind. On the rare occasion I managed to strop and sulk my way into staying in the room, everyone talked over my head or around me. The doctors pretended I wasn't there or made noncommittal noises in the back of their throats while they scribbled on their charts, and my parents clucked and patted my hand and called me Rosie. The school might've said I was smart as a pip and a whip, and my parents might've believed them when it came to report cards and awards mounted in tasteful shadowboxes mounted over the fireplace and National Honor Society dinners, but when it came to matters of medicine and the real world, I was still their little girl, a squirming preemie the size of Daddy's hand who spent the first four months of her life lying on a diaper instead of wearing it and getting crud wiped out of my eyes and suctioned out of my nose. I was a living doll baby who needed to be protected from the world and all its pitfalls and sharp edges, so they insulated me with private therapists and PCAs and dictated the course of my treatment with the opening of their checkbook and the flourish of Daddy's signature on the check._

_They didn't mean it as an unkindness. It was love, smothering and insatiable and all-consuming. They made the hard choices so I wouldn't have to, one less cross for me to bear. And it was. But every choice they made for me was one less that I could make for myself, and my world shifted on its axis with each new edict they handed down with smiles and endearments. Sometimes it expanded, and sometimes it contracted, but it always changed, and it was never quite solid beneath my feet. It was never really mine, either, but the world as they believed I'd want it if I just tried it for a while. Mama knew best, after all, and Daddy paid for it with his platinum Visa._

_The summer after my sophomore year, there was talk of breaking my back and inserting a steel rod into my spine. They were worried about scoliosis after a routine x-ray showed a ten-degree curve.. They hauled me off to an orthopedic specialist for second opinion and consults and more x-rays. It's a wonder my ovaries didn't shrivel up and die that summer, and never mind the little metal hearts they slapped on my lower belly. Doctors and x-ray techs examined the results, and then the doctor ushered my parents behind doors too heavy for me to open even if I wanted to, and I got left in the waiting room with cranky toddlers too young to know why they were hurting so much and parents who weren't granted that numbing luxury._

_The let me in the room just one time. They said it was because they wanted to hear my opinion, but I didn't get two sentences and a mouthful of adolescent terror in before the doctor swiveled away from me on his stool and started talking about surgical options and recovery periods and optimal long-term outcomes as though it were a foregone conclusion that his will would be done, God issuing wisdom from his vinyl-seated mount._

_I might've just sat there and taken it like the good little lady I was meant to be, but I'll be damned if that smug bastard didn't pat me on the knee and hand me a_ Highlights _magazine as if I were a fussy child who needed distraction from adult matters and not a sixteen-year-old girl listening to a goddamned horror story in which I had a starring role whether I wanted it or not. A spine snapped as neat as you please and bracketed by titanium rods. Six months in a body cast and six more of rehab to correct the atrophy of muscles gone dormant. Skin rashes from the cast. The wet-cotton stink of unwashed skin and the relentless itch of sweat rilling between breasts I couldn't scratch while the summer sun turned all that plaster and fiberglass into a goddamn broiler. A permanent catheter. The joy of marinating in shit and blood when the nurses were too slow with the bedpan or the tampon._

 _It was the condescension, the sheer, galling presumptuousness of it. Maybe if my parents had even pretended to hear me out or that fool of a surgeon had handed me anything else--a_ Cosmo _or an_ Elle _or a_ Vogue-- _I might not've lost my mind, but there they were, in that office where the walls matched the green of the doctor's scrubs, chatting it up like they were just sitting a spell and deciding my life like it was the easiest thing in the world to be torn apart and remade by inexpert hands who had assumed a gift meant for God's hands, and all they'd left me with was the daunting prospect of boiling in my own mess for six months and a magazine meant for children still fuzzy on what number came after six._

_Until that moment, I thought anger was hot. But it isn't. Anger--real anger--is cold, so cold it burns everything it touches. It scorches flesh and freezes blood and turns bone to stone. Real anger has no conscience, and it doesn't give a fart in a high wind for the social niceties. My parents were sitting in those boxy chairs that sprout from the floor of every hospital room and doctor's office like squat, staid toadstools. Mama had her legs crossed at the ankle beneath her skirt, and her nylons rasped whenever she moved. She was leaned forward in her chair with her elbow propped on the armrest and her chin bobbing as she nodded, an acolyte held in thrall by the Word of the Lord. Daddy was leaned forward, too, elbows on the knees of his khakis and tie hanging down like a drooping tongue, and I remember that I wanted to reach out and jerk on that tie until he came out of that chair with his eyes bugged out of his red-faced head._

_I didn't, though. Instead, I took a hold of that infuriating magazine, cocked back my arm, and whopped that doctor upside the head with it. He was so absorbed in his litany of the miracles he would work upon my imperfect form that he never saw it coming. My impromptu cudgel caught him flush on the ear. I've never seen a doctor come out of his amphibious crouch faster, hand clapped to his insulted ear and incredulity etched on his face. In retrospect, it wasn't the smartest thing to do to a man who might be holding my spine in his gloved hands, but at the time, I didn't give a damn. Anger narrows your focus, and all that existed for me was his profile as he sat on that stool and the drone of his voice as he dissected the next year of my life with the clinical efficiency of a med student vivisecting a dead fetal pig. I wanted to shut him up and make him see me, not the case file bulging inside his clipboard._

_He saw me, all right, and he was fit to be tied as he stood there with his ear stinging within the cup of his palm and my chart hanging from his fingers. He was the emperor shorn of his clothes, naked for the world to see. Mama and Daddy were mortified, and Mama opened her mouth to give me both barrels and a piece of her mind, but before she could, I opened my own mouth and let fly with the contents of my spleen. I used words I didn't even know I knew, and by the time Daddy collected his wits and hauled me out of there, I'd let them know just what I thought of their proposed plans for the next year of my life. Somewhere in the middle of the caterwauling, I'd started to cry, and there were tears and snot on my face when Daddy rolled me into the hall, pushing so hard that my neck whiplashed on the initial shove out the door._

_He was disgusted with me, they both were, but I never did spend my summer and fall roasting in plaster and piss, and not long after that, a nurse with enough sense to look figured out that one leg was nearly two inches shorter than the other. A custom shoe lift did in one afternoon what a lesser god and one hundred thousand dollars wouldn't have done in a year. Mama and Daddy never brought it up, but I think they realized that they'd dodged a bullet, because their pique at my unbecoming misbehavior faded pretty quickly. They took me and Daniel up to Pawley's Island for two weeks in August, just before school started up again, and the only itch on my skin was from the sand in the crack of my ass and the sunburn on my nose._

_I'd always thought they never went through with it because they'd decided to let well enough alone and let God have His way for once, or because they couldn't bring themselves to inflict that much prolonged misery for such minimal gain. Good parents love their children, even the broken, graceless ones, and they were good people, fine and just and doing the best they could. Maybe mercy stayed their hand._

_Then Daniel told his bitter home truths and sent me marching to the cryotubes, and now I can help but wonder if you'd been wrong for all those years. Maybe it was mercy that keep you out of that bed in the long-term recovery ward at the children's hospital, or maybe it was simple self-preservation. Maybe they drove home that afternoon and toted up the cost over glasses of scotch, the tongue of Daddy's tie not just hanging, but lolling like it had been torn out by the roots, and Mama scratching her forehead with the tips of her perfectly-manicured nails while she lay on the leather couch in Daddy's office. Maybe the calculator and Excel spreadsheet spat out figures Daddy just couldn't stomach, no matter how much they loved me._

_Or maybe they just didn't want to be the ones to scrape shit and blood off plaster while all their friends summered in the Caymans._

_Either way, that was the first and last time I was included in decisions about my medical future. Now here's this young doctor who's got vinegar and home in his mouth, and he's asking me to choose. Not just asking, but expecting it. Like it's the most natural thing in the world and the way it should be, and I'll be damned if I know what to do with it._

She rested her palms on the warm solidity of his upturned forearms. "I'm ready when you are, Doctor."

The doctor began his familiar count, and on the count of three, she slipped from the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor. Her hands found his shoulders, and his found her buckling hips and held her up. "I'm going to lift up your left hip, bring it in true with your right. When I do, I want you to turn with me. It'll be like a two-step waltz. Ready?"

She nodded. "I've always wanted to dance."

"All right, now. Here we go." His hand cupped the spar of her hip, warm and sure and steady, and then he raised it. For a moment, she was straight, and then the doctor's own hips were rolling as he pivoted with her. She was weightless in the turn, a leaf carried on the wind, and she grinned, exhilarated. It lasted only a moment, and then the doctor set her into the wheelchair. All the weight that she had momentarily lost found her again and settled over her in a smothering, wet mantle that collapsed her hips and bowed her spine.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

"I do believe that was part of a foxtrot." He rested a hand on the push handle of her chair. "You'll be doing it for yourself soon enough. The AFOs I ordered for you should be done in the next few days. I've also put in for a pair of shoes with a corrective lift. It'll straighten you out, make you more comfortable, and once you're straight, your balance will improve and I can have someone from engineering put some handrails in."

"I appreciate it."

He shrugged. "It's my job."

"Maybe," she agreed. "But I've had far worse."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"Good, because it's the way I meant it."

"Well, don't go singing my praises just yet, because your rehab starts now. I'll meet you in the therapy room." He gave her push handle a brisk double tap and went to his desk to retrieve his tablet. "What are you waiting for?" he demanded when she lingered to watch him. "Go on."

She went. Even with her head start, he passed her on the way in the door, tablet swinging from one hand. He was waiting for her by the time she pulled up in front of the blue exercise mat that dominated the floor.

"Do you want me to get out?" She reached down to set her brakes.

"Not yet. We're starting slow and easy." He snagged a small, rolling stool from the corner and settled himself on it, and then he heel-walked it to where she sat. "Top or bottom?"

"What?"

"I'm not going to give you many choices in here, Miss Walker, not until I'm sure I've got you on the right road, but I'm giving you this one. I'm going to stretch you from top to bottom. The only choice you get is where I start."

 _He's all doctor now,_ she realized. _No joking or foxtrotting, just a long, hard, lonely road._ "Top."

"All right." A brusque nod. He stood and put a hand on the back of her head. "I'm going to slowly push your head toward your chest. I want you to push back as much as you can without straining, If it starts to burn or hurt, you're doing too much. Deep breath in." When she complied, he applied gentle pressure to compel her chin toward her chest. "Push back and breathe out. Slow and steady." When her breath hissed from between her teeth, he murmured, "Just like that. Good. Try and hold me here until the count of ten. If you can't, it's all right. Today's all about getting baselines."

Her resistance meant little in the end. Her head drooped inexorably toward her chest, a willow tree bent to the earth by the inexorable insistence of ropes twined through its slender branches. He made it to six before her chin met the rough fabric of her shirt. His hand left her head. "Up." When she obeyed, it returned. "Again."

Five times he rested his hand on the back of her head and bid her resist, and five times, her muscles surrendered before her will. When he was finished, he paused to scribble something on his tablet, and then he dropped the stylus and placed a hand on either side of her head. His palms were smooth against her ears. "I don't want you to do anything," he said, his voice muffled by the light but firm press of his hands. "I'm just going to roll your neck. Just take a deep breath, close your eyes, and let it out like before."

The world rolled in the darkness behind her eyes. Right, back, and a long, unhurried roll to the left. He brought her head forward by slow degrees, and blood rushed into muscles gone to stone through years of unremitting spasticity. It was an unfamiliar sensation, but hardly unpleasant, and she fought the ridiculous impulse to purr.

Five seemed to be the doctor's magic number, because after five repetitions, he paused to make another note on his tablet. The stylus chattered against the screen with amiable urgency as he wrote, and then he tossed them both onto the nearby table. 

"You're awfully rough with that," she mused as he placed one hand on her shoulder and gripped her wrist with the other.

"It'll live," he muttered. He held her arm out to the side and pressed his palm against her shoulder joint to keep it stable as it wobbled in its socket. "I'm going to stretch your arm to test your range of motion. You tell me when it starts to feel uncomfortable, and I don't mean when it hurts."

"Yes, Doctor."

He hummed low in his throat in acknowledgment of her acquiescence and pulled on her arm with careful, deliberate pressure.

"My upper arm is starting to ache a little," she told him once her arm was fully extended.

"Where? Front or back?" His tone was calm, but his eyes were alert and searching as he gazed down at her.

"Back."

The hand at her shoulder drifted down to prod her tricep. "Mm. I'm guessing it's because they're used to propping on your armrests. They've stiffened up on you, contracted. It's not too bad, but it could get worse as you get older. The more stretching you do, the easier it'll be." His hand returned to her shoulder. "I'm going to pull again," he said, and then he did.

He repeated the process with her other arm, and then he moved behind her. "Hold your arms out to your side." 

She did as she was told. Later, as the days wore on and her routines became ossified, set by the doctor's meticulous schedule, she would chafe beneath the monotonous tedium, but today there was a dull comfort to it. It was familiar, safe. She couldn't get out of bed or use the bathroom by herself, and she had no idea how to work the replicator behind the doctor's desk, but she knew this, understood it with the fluency of the native speaker. It was a sliver of life as she had always known it, and even as her chest tightened at the prospect of never escaping it, she clung to the loveless embrace it offered.

Dr. McCoy gripped her wrists from behind. "Lower your head and relax. I'm going to pull on you from behind." 

She dropped her head and waited.

"I won't hurt you," he promised quietly, and he sounded so much like Georgia that she wanted to weep. Then he began to tug. Cartilage that hadn't moved in centuries crackled and popped in her shoulders and sternum, and her arms jittered with helpless tremors as muscles unaccustomed to such extension fought the shift in position.

"Relax," he urged. "That's as far as I'm going."

She hung there, suspended by his grip. Her arms shook, and her fingers splayed helplessly as blood flowed into them, unencumbered by the perpetual crook of her arms. Her pectorals simmered with a pleasant heat, and her breasts, aided by her outthrust chest, stood high and proud.

 _If only they could look like that all the time,_ she thought ruefully. _Most of the time, they just sit there like leaking sandbags._

He slowly released the tension and lowered her arms. Then, he swept to her front and made another note on his tablet. When he was finished, he settled himself on his stool, knees turned outward, and reached for her hands. "So what's your favorite color?"

The question was so unexpected that she started and closed her hand around his fingers in a convulsive grip.

"Something hurt?" he asked sharply, and tried to pry her fingers loose.

"No. No," she answered, and forced her fingers to relinquish their panicky hold. "Just surprised. Wasn't expecting you to ask me anything but to hold out my hands. Did I hurt you?" she asked anxiously, and eyed his fingers as he shook them between his knees.

"No. And I do want you to give me your hands. I also want to know your favorite color."

She held out her hands. "It depends. My all-time favorite is red. The brighter, the better. Fire-engine, candy-apple red. I used to love watching firetrucks as a kid. And those Corvettes made my covetous little heart go pitter-patter."

"Lay your hands flat to mine. You a car buff?"

"Not really. I just liked the ones that went fast. Maybe I got it from my brother. He loved cars, always had those little Hot Wheels. I always wanted to go fast. When I was a kid, this kid from my class figured out how to get the governor off my electric wheelchair. Once he got it off, I spent the afternoon pulling the skater kids up to their makeshift skate ramps. It was awesome. At least until I got home and nearly shot myself through the sliding glass door and into the pool. I thought Mama was going to kill me. I got grounded instead. Not like it made much difference in my social calendar, but two weeks without books, TV, or the Internet is a long time when they're all you've got." She fell silent, embarrassed by her outpouring of ridiculous incidental anecdotes about which the doctor likely gave not a single damn. "I like yellow, too, I suppose," she added. "Only sunshine yellow. Everything else reminds me of pus."

And with that, she clamped her mouth firmly shut. _Oh, for Christ's sake, why can't I keep my fool mouth shut?_ she wailed.

He lifts her palms with his own, bending her wrists back. "I was always partial to green," he said as though she hadn't just been babbling inanely on about speeding motorized wheelchairs and pus. "The fields around the family farm turned the most amazing shade of green every spring and summer. It went as far as the eye could see. I used to run through it in my bare feet. Soft as carpet."

There was a wistful timbre to his voice that stirred a chord of empathy within her, but his gaze was on the steady rise of her hands as the angle of her hands neared ninety degrees.

"The dairy farm you mentioned before?" she asked. It seemed safer than offering platitudes like stale canapes at a failing afternoon social.

"Mmhmm." He paused at the first sign of resistance. "I'm going to push a bit more," he warned.

She bit back a bark of pain at a bright, sharp throb from the top of her wrist. "Son of a biscuit!" she swore.

"Sorry," Dr. McCoy said, but damned if he didn't sound amused. "That's one I hadn't heard before."

Comprehension dawned and snuffed her burgeoning flicker of nettled pique. "Grandmama Lavinia said ladies didn't curse in polite company."

"So I didn't hear you cursing a blue streak when you first came to?"

"Extenuating circumstances," she said primly. "And it wasn't a streak. It was one word."

"Or two." He lowered her hands and slowly bent them downward. "All right. Can you turn them palms up?"

She hesitated. "They don't really work that way." She held out her hands and turned them palms up. The right was nearly flat, but the left pitched toward her chest at a steep angle.

McCoy frowned. "Does it hurt?"

"If you pull on them, it will."

He tried to turn her recalcitrant palm flat, but pain cramped her hand, and she jerked it from his grasp and curled it into a tight fist.

"Dammit," she snapped. "I told you that hurt. I don't know why you doctors never take my word for it. I've only been living in this body for thirty years. I think I know when something's going to hurt."

"Yeah, well, I can't just take your word for it, Miss Walker. For all they want my help, people have an alarming habit of fudging and embellishing the truth. They exaggerate and minimize and fail to mention that the pimples on their backside are oozing green pus that smells like Louisiana swamp gas. Nor do they mention that the symptoms started two months ago after a rendezvous at a shuttleport cathouse."

"Cathouse?" she repeated incredulously, and bit the inside of her cheek to stifle a cackle that could be badly misinterpreted.

He fell abruptly silent. "My point is," he said brusquely, "that folks do an awful lot of lying when they shouldn't. It would make all our lives easier if they would just be honest, but my father used to tell me that I could wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one got filled first."

"I don't think 'spit' in the word you're looking for, Doctor," she said mildly.

"Well, it's the one I'll be using," he retorted. Then, more softly, "You're not the only one who knows about polite company."

 _Well, my, my, my,_ Grandmama Lavinia crooned. _Looks like chivalry isn't dead, after all._

"I don't suppose I am," she said, and returned her hand to his care.

"Until human nature changes, I have to see for myself just what 'hurts' means to you. That means I have to poke and prod and do things I'd rather not. Trust me, Miss Walker, I take no pleasure in making you think I'm a merciless son of a bit-biscuit."

 _Nice save, Doctor,_ she thought, and her lips twitched.

"I need to rotate it the other way," he told her. "I won't do it twice." 

He gingerly coaxed her lopsided palm in the other direction. Spastic muscles and atrophied tendons rebelled with a bolt of agonizing reprisal, and she jerked involuntarily, feet flying from the footplates and splaying in front of her, narrowly missing the doctor's shins.

"Sorry!" A timorous, strangled peep, and she blinked to clear her watering eyes. _Fuck._

"Nothing to be sorry for." He set her hands on her lap. "Sit a minute." He turned on his stool and busied himself with his tablet. 

She watched him for a moment. "The dairy farm you grew up on, was it a working farm?"

"It was." The stylus flew to and fro across the small screen. "It was small, local mostly, but it kept the family working."

"I thought you said there was no money nowadays."

"There isn't. Money isn't the only reason to take up a profession, you know."

"But if you don't sell what the farm produces, what do you do with it?"

"Distribute it, of course," he answered.

"But where?"

"Schools, hospitals, missions, daycare centers, probably a even a few restaurants. If you want to know more than that, you'd have to ask my mother."

"She runs it?"

"The business end, yeah. My brother oversees the day-to-day operations, does the heavy lifting."

"But if it's not for profit, then what's it for? What do get out of it?"

He looked up from his tablet, brow furrowed in consternation. "What do you mean, 'what do you get out of it?' Family history and tradition, for starters. My grandfather started the farm, and my father ran it all his life. I grew up on that farm, tended the horses and the livestock, even learned how to milk a goat. It's my home, that's what I get out of it. Not to mention the personal satisfaction of doing some good for the world." He finished writing with an emphatic tap of his stylus.

"I'm sorry, Doctor," she said, startled by his vehemence. "I meant no offense. It's just-how do you live without money? So replicators make food, medicine, and clothing, but who builds houses? Who decides where to build a house in the first place? Does everyone barter for land, or do they scrap for it like Buford Pusser in a bar brawl?"

"Buford Pusser?" he echoed blankly.

"Character from _Walking Tall_ , an old movie from the 70s? Well, the 1970s," she clarified. When he continued to stare at her in mute incomprehension, she shook her head. "Never mind. Doesn't matter. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how things work without money."

"You sound like a Ferengi," he muttered, and set his feet on the floor, toes and knees pointed outward. He held out his hands. "I'm going to pull you forward and down to stretch your spine. Keep your feet on the footrests and don't let me pull your behind off the seat."

His hands closed around hers, and she let him pull her forward and down. Soon, her stomach was on her knees and her hair brushed her ankles with cool, golden fingers. Her spine creaked and crackled as muscles relaxed and compressed vertebrae expanded. She stared at the floor between her feet and the sides of the doctor's clean, white sneakers and the hint of black dress sock that peeked from beneath the hem of his scrub pants. He smelled of soap and aftershave, clean and crisp, and she was content to let herself drift as she hung in that improbable position, arms outstretched and chin resting on her shins.

"As for what makes the world go 'round these days, I'm not the one to ask. I learned the basics in high-school civics, but that was a while ago, and I'm a doctor, not an economist," McCoy said above her head, and his calves flexed and bunched as he shifted on the stool to ease her forward another painstaking fraction.

"Should I add that to the ever-expanding list of things you're not?" she mumbled to her shins.

McCoy snorted. "Once I get you a padd, you can access any number of books on the subject. Or anything else that strikes your fancy."

"A pad?" 

"A padd," he corrected. "It's a handheld computer. You can store information on it and access archives, databases, and libraries. There's nothing you can't find if you know how to look."

"So the Internet lives. I always wondered if it would survive the global collapse and inevitable nuclear war."

"You can rest your head on that score. It came through just fine, along with the cockroaches and palmetto bugs. Those bastards are still as big as my hand."

"Huh. I wonder if my teenage blog is still there. And the bad music videos I watched."

He released her hands. "Come up slowly so you don't get a head rush," he ordered. "As for your blog, I couldn't say, but I doubt it. Most of the pre-war stuff was purged if it was deemed to be of no historical value." 

She fumbled for the armrests of her chair and heaved herself upright. "So no dancing gerbils or overheated musings on the rank unfairness of the world." She took a deep breath to ease the cramp in her chest and brushed the hair from her face.

"Afraid not." He slipped a hand behind her knee and lifted it from the seat. "Just let it hang a second," he said when she made to lift it from his hand. "You can start a new one if you've a mind. We call them logs now. Once you get settled, I'll show you how it works. Raise your leg for me. Bring it toward me and hold it until I tell you."

Her leg shot out and jutted stiffly in front of her, toes pointed outward. She tried to hold it still, but to no avail. It swayed and bobbled, a dancing cobra in an opium fugue, and her quadricep ached and burned. She gritted her teeth with the effort of holding it aloft, but after a few moments, it collapsed, heel barking the footrest.

"Sorry," she said, and sank in her seat, embarrassed by her gross lack of stamina. She studied the drab, grey wall to her right."

"Just baselines," he reminded her. "Once we figure out where we are, we can get you where you need to be." He switched his hand to the opposite leg. "I'm not here to judge you, Miss Walker. I'm here to help."

 _You aren't real,_ she thought as the warmth of his cradling hand seeped into the cold, stiff flesh of her knee and calf. _I've died in that tin can, and this is just some dream my disintegrating brain has conjured up as it turns to jelly inside my skull. Or maybe this is heaven. It's not the way I pictured it, not the one I wanted, but maybe this is the one I deserved. This isn't real because doctors don't talk this way, act this way. They poke and prod and shill medications that cost an arm and a leg and give you dry mouth and pimples and dry out your untapped snatch, and then they charge you the other arm and leg for their oh-so-precious time. And if you happen to get sick during their tee time, then take two damn aspirin and don't call unless you're dying._

"You know the drill," he prodded when her leg hung slackly in his grip.

"Mm? Oh, of course. Begging your pardon. I was just...wool-gathering." She raised her leg. It was the stronger leg, the plant-and-pivot leg, so it lasted longer than the other, but not by much. Soon, it, too, began to sway and wobble precariously on the steady brace of his cradling hand and clattered onto the footplates.

"Good," he said, and gently rearranged her foot on the footrest.

 _Hardly,_ she thought wryly, but kept it to herself.

He stood and strode to a small replicator on the far side of the room. "I'm going to give you some water, and I want you to drink it before we get down on the mat."

"I just had a glass of orange juice with breakfast."

"And now you're having some water. You need to get in the habit of drinking more than a hummingbird." He entered his request into the keypad.

"I told you it plays hell on my bladder."

"And I told you that I don't care," he replied tartly. "Your kidneys need plenty of liquid to flush your system, and the last thing you want is kidney disease on top of everything else." He picked up the glass of water the replicator produced and started toward her, only to backtrack and key in a second request. A moment later, it spat out a flexible straw.

"I figured you would've cured that by now," she teased, touched that he remembered such a small detail.

"We did. That's not the point." He returned to his stool and handed her the glass.

"Maybe I'd go more if I didn't have to leave my dignity at the door every time I need to go. Thirty years old and having a spectator for every tinkle and plop."

 _So much for polite society,_ Grandmama Lavinia said primly, and she nearly inhaled her sip of water.

McCoy regarded her in silence while she drank, tablet balanced precariously on one green-scrubbed knee. "This ship wasn't designed with disability accommodation in mind," he said. "Most conditions like yours are easily treatable shortly after birth, and while Starfleet will generally take any body dumb or desperate enough to blunder through their door, they stop short of recruiting at old folks' homes."

"But this is essentially a floating hospital, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then don't you have people who break their legs coming down the stairs or slip a disc in the engine room?"

"I can repair those in minutes."

"What about catastrophic accidents? You said some crazy guy blew up half your ship. Didn't you have major casualties then?"

"Most of them were sucked through a hull breach and died instantly. There was nothing I could do for them. The ones I could treat recovered completely within a few days. They could get around on crutches or lean on an orderly. They didn't need anything but a handrail."

 _You can heal the whole goddamn world in half an hour, but you couldn't fix me,_ she thought bitterly. "How lucky for them," she croaked, and stoppered her lips with her straw before she lapsed into a bout of unbecoming self-pity.

"It's not ideal, I know," he said, and then, to her surprise, he stopped. He stared at his tablet for a long moment before he spoke again, turning it thoughtfully in his hands. "It's not fair is what it is. I'd change it if I could, but I can't remodel the whole damn ship. I don't even think Scotty could."

She had no idea who Scotty was, but she knew the truth when she heard it, and though she was grudgingly grateful for the sincerity of the doctor's regret, it did little to sweeten the taste of gall that burned in her belly and sat sour and rotten on her tongue. It was familiar, the scalding tang of disappointment, but now there was no spoonful of grandmother's soothing sugar to help the medicine go down.

_It ain't fair, honey, it surely isn't, but don't you take it out on him. If you do, you'll regret it later, and nothing good ever came from spreading the misery._

_I don't see much good from holding it in, either,_ she pointed out dully. _It's like walking around with a hot poker in your gut that never comes loose._

 _That may be,_ Grandmama agreed, and the compassion in her voice made her jaws ache. _And Lord knows I'm not telling you to fashion your guts into bootstraps and throttle yourself with them. Lock yourself in a room and scream your fool head off if you have to. Pound a pillow. Ask your young doctor there to set up a punching bag and kick the tar out of it until you either feel better or you can't lift your arms. Break a few dishes. Do whatever you have to do to get the poison out, but don't you dare pour it over his head for want of anywhere else to put it._

_If I go breaking dishes, they're liable to put me on a psych hold. And in case you haven't noticed, I don't exactly have my own room to scream in._

_Well, then, you're just going to have to bear up, honey. You just set your feet and square your shoulders and get on with it, and you do it with as much grace as you can muster. It's what I taught you, and it's how a lady behaves, cool under fire no matter how hot the flames. You just keep your head up, and the hardship'll pass in its time._

_I'm tired, Memaw. No matter how far I walk, it all looks the same, and I just want to sit right down and tell the rest of the world to keep on going._

_I know, my little rose, I know, but you can't. This is your path to walk, and you have to follow it, see it through. I can't tell you where it's going, darlin', but I_ promise _you I'll be there at the end of it._

She sucked down water gone to sand in her throat and surreptitiously surveyed the doctor from behind the fall of her hair. His expression was grave, but his eyes were soft, and his hands still turned his tablet like a futuristic worrystone.

 _Go on,_ her grandmother urged. _Go on now. Shoulders up and back straight. A Walker pays her debts, and you need to repay his kindness in kind._

"I guess I can add engineer to the list of things you aren't." It was a feeble joke, and probably a tired one, but it was the best she could manage.

"You keep adding to that list, you're going run out of room for much else," he warned, but the tablet had stilled, and some of the tension had left his face. 

"I've got to have something to occupy my mind. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, as the old saying goes." She took another pull from the straw.

"Like I said, I'll get you set up with a padd, and once I'm not worried about you breaking your ankles the minute you bump anything harder than the exercise mat, you'll be free to explore the ship. That ought to keep you occupied."

"Is it big?"

"Oh, sweetheart, there's so much to see, you won't know where to start," he promised, and clapped her on the shoulder.

"Sounds exciting," she said, intrigued, and offered a small, fleeting smile. She finished the water with a final gurgling slurp and held out the empty cup.

He took it with a hum of approval and set it on the table behind him. "You have no idea. Now let's get you on the mat."

She expected him to roll out of the way and watch her technique as she flung herself out of the chair in an unwieldy tangle of trembling, splayed limbs, but instead, he leaned down and scooped her from her chair. She squawked in surprise and curled an arm around his neck.

"Didn't mean to take you by surprise," he said as he dropped to one knee and lowered her to the mat. "I don't think you're up to complex transfers right now, and I don't want you burning all your energy for no good reason." He knelt beside her and carefully straightened her legs and aligned her hips. "Your knees always hyperextend like that?" he asked.

"They did a hamstring and adductor release when I was a kid. The surgeon admitted he got a little overzealous.

"You ever hurt yourself with it? Any sprains, tears, dislocations?"

"A few sprains, and my kneecaps slide and catch sometimes."

He manipulated her kneecaps with deft fingers. "They don't seem to like going anywhere but backwards," he observed.

She shrugged. "It never really hurt, so I just let them be. Had too much else to worry about."

"Well, once we get you stronger, I can fix them if you want. It's not much, but it'll give you a little more stability."

"Will it hurt?"

"It shouldn't take but a few minutes under local anesthetic. You might be a little sore and experience a minor burning sensation at the incision sites for a day or two, but that's about it."

"Is 'minor burning sensation' doctorese for 'It'll burn like hell for a week, and you'll wish you could saw your legs off to make it stop'?" she asked dubiously. "In my experience, doctors undersell the pain levels involved in their procedures."

"I can't say for certain," he admitted. "I've never had it done. But I haven't heard any horror stories, and if there is pain, I've got something for it. Anti-inflammatories, too, so you won't swell up."

"Long recovery period and rehab?"

"Not really." He knee-walked to her feet. "Laser scalpels are very precise, do minimal damage, and what little they do is treatable with tissue regenerators. A week, ten days, and you'll never know you had surgery."

"It sounds too good to be true."

"Welcome to the wonderful world of modern medicine, Miss Walker," he answered proudly, and she grinned at his obvious enthusiasm.

Her pleasure was short-lived. The doors to the therapy room opened with a pneumatic whoosh, and two pairs of crepe-soled sneakers appeared in her peripheral vision, attached to socked feet and hairless ankles and white hems. Her heart sank. 

_Orderlies,_ she thought glumly. _Or PT interns looking to earn their hours._

"This is Yeoman Stuart," Dr. McCoy said, oblivious to her shift in mood, and he gestured to a slender, young man with a long nose and red hair that bristled atop his scalp. "And this is Yeoman Connors." He shifted his attention to a short, dainty woman with short black hair cut into a bob and eyes to match. "They're PT specialists doing their residencies aboard ship. Once we've established a routine, they'll be overseeing your day-to-day exercise regimen."

 _What good will that do them?_ she wanted to shout. _It's not like they can look forward to a long career treating CP patients. You cured us all, remember?_ She said nothing. She merely pressed her lips together and offered them a curt nod of acknowledgment.

 _There's no use getting het up about it,_ Grandmama Lavinia said frankly. _They're part of the deal, just like the sweat and the stink of a body pushed past its limits and the shadows that lurk outside the door while you're using the ladies' room. No doctor, no matter how fair or compassionate, takes on the scut work of reshaping a broken body. They don't have the time or the inclination, and even if they had the latter, they've got too many other lives to save, too many other wounds to patch. You might as well make your peace with them, because you can't wish them away._

 _Such lovely scenery on this road of mine,_ she fumed, and rolled her head to spare them a cursory glance. It didn't matter what they looked like. They would be nothing but dry, efficient hands on her stiff, touch-starved flesh and voices that drifted over her head like passing clouds and left the sweet, bitter smell of stale coffee in their wake.

"Now that the gang's all here, I'm going to get straight to it," Dr. McCoy said briskly, and curled his hands around the spare, hairy spindles of her ankles. "All I want you to do is take a deep breath, relax, and stretch your feet."

 _And so it begins._ There was no choice. The road she'd started on thirty years ago, rolling on her infant belly and crawling on pudgy toddler hands and knees was far behind her now and forever closed, and she had given the doctor her word. So she took a deep breath that smelled of surgical scrubs and plastic mat and willed her toes and feet to stretch.

Her feet and calves shook and juddered in his steady grip, a powerful shudder that started in her soles and rose into her stringy hamstrings in a convulsive, helpless ague, and she knew without looking that it was so much purposeless movement on the ends of her misaligned legs. She could feel their eyes on her, avid and intent, ants crawling over her exposed weakness, and she turned her head to escape their scrutiny and stare vacantly at a power point in the shadow of the table.

"Don't turn your head," the doctor chided. "I need your spine straight."

She returned her head to its original position and closed her eyes in a bid to find respite in the darkness, but her mind had always been keen, and the sensation lingered, intrusive and licentious. Her hands, which had been splayed palms down at her sides, curled into fists, and her legs twitched and contracted in an effort to draw her knees to her belly.

"Hey, easy," Dr. McCoy said, confused by her sudden tension. He did not understand, and she couldn't think of an explanation that would not cut and offend, could not tell him that she felt naked and misbegotten, an abomination to their clinical gazes. So she kept her eyes and mouth resolutely shut and willed her muscles to obey.

"You hurting?"

 _Not anywhere you can reach._ "No. Just...no.

 _Just close your eyes and ride it out,_ her grandmother said. _Concentrate on the good things, honey, like how hard that nice doctor is trying to help you. Think about how nice his hands feel. Smooth as warm butter, with no nicotine stains on the fingertips, no calluses, He's a fellow who seems to practice what he preaches when it comes to taking care of himself. He smells nice, too, sandalwood and soap. Just keep your eyes closed and pretend you're getting a rubdown from some well-oiled cabana boy. You can get through it, and it'll be done with._

 _Until tomorrow,_ whispered the grating, gleeful voice of hard experience in her head. _And the day after that. And the one after that. You've given him two hundred and forty days to reshape you into an image more pleasing to his eye. Those warm, smooth hands are going to pull you apart a muscle fiber at a time, or rather the clumsier hands of his subordinates will. You're going to burn and ache and grunt like a whore riding bareback on cheap cotton sheets, and when you're done, you'll be just as anonymous. They'll pull you apart and put you back together again a hundred times, and none of them will bother to see what they've made. You're just another jigsaw puzzle to be solved and set aside, and when your time is up and there are no more mysteries to be unraveled, no more secrets to be mined from your strange and twisted anatomy, the interns will be off to the next milestone in their fledgling careers and the doctor's compassion will dry up like so much piss in the hot desert wind. He'll pat you on the back made straighter by the work of his hands and move on to his next miracle, and you'll be left on some desolate outpost like a piece of delayed freight left to the lost and found. Except no one is going to claim you, are they?_

She thought of her brother, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of tea and delivering his terrible truths with a voice sweet as honey. She thought of his conspicuous absence the day the cold, sucking waters of the cryotube had closed over her head and smothered the light for two hundred and forty years. She thought of him in Rio, fingers slick with suntan oil and the condensation from his beer and heart beating strong and sure inside his chest. Alive and vibrant and free. Glad of it while she drifted in a forgotten sleep from which she could not wake. She thought of the wild hope in her mother's eyes when she had first broached the subject, and of the guilty relief in her father's when she had agreed over mashed potatoes and green beans. She thought of Mama singing all the way home on that last day, singing like a bird released from her cage, and of Grandmama Lavina, standing on her front porch and waving goodbye with a smile on her face, never knowing there would never be another chance. Grandmama would have come for her, would have come on the fly and with fire in her belly, but she was two hundred years in the ground, and she had used up her last miracle with her first breath.

There was no one else to take her in. This was as close to home as she was ever going to get, and she would have to earn her keep, would have to sing for her supper as she'd done when she'd taken his battery of intelligence and aptitude tests. She would have to earn her keep with every probing proprietary touch of their hands, every stretch and butt lift and clinical, scouring gaze.

So she shoved the voice aside, retreated into herself as deeply as she could without slipping from awareness, and sang for her supper.

The therapy room was a place beyond time. Even had her eyes been open to see it, there was no clock upon the bare, grey walls. There were only the grasping hands that prodded and shifted and repositioned her as they chose and distant voices that bid her stretch and resist and roll and raise and lift and turn. She complied, shielded by the darkness behind her eyelids, and each act of submission was a note in her joyless song.

McCoy's hands gripped her hips and rolled them first to one side and then the other. Then he pulled them up into an inelegant arch. The roll of it was so perversely intimate that her breath hitched, and she squeezed her eyes more tightly shut.

The doctor hesitated, hands bracing her hovering hips. "You all right?" he demanded.

 _Sing for your supper, Rose. Sing like a little bird._ "Yes. I'm fine, Doctor."

She waited for the thorough inspection to resume, but he lowered her hips to the mat, and she felt him shift above her.

"I think that's enough for today."

She was so surprised that her eyes flew open. Dr. McCoy knelt over her on bended knee beside her right hip. He glanced at her as she lifted her head from the mat with the airy kiss of vinyl parting from skin.

"We're done?" she asked disbelievingly.

"I've gotten enough to get some ideas," he said. To the interns, he said, "You two can return to your duties. We'll discuss schedules and exercise plans tomorrow after I've completed the evaluation."

"Yes, sir," they chorused. Connors made to leave, but Stuart lingered, rocking on the balls of his feet with his hands clasped behind his back. "Do you need us to help with her transfer, Doctor?"

"No, I got it."

"Very good, sir." He saluted crisply and followed his companion through the door.

"You can always tell the ones fresh from the Academy," McCoy muttered when the doors had slid shut behind them. "They do stupid things like salute me." He patted her shoulder. "It's about time you opened your eyes. You were squeezing them so tight I thought you were going to sprain your forehead. I'm going to sit you up." 

"It's just easier," she said as he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her into a sitting position.

"What is?" He slipped an arm around her shoulders.

"Not to look at them."

"Wh-?" he began, and then comprehension dawned. He slipped his free arm behind her knees. "Why?"

She shrugged. "It just is," she repeated diffidently.

He lifted her with practiced ease and set her in her chair. "Once we finish the evaluation tomorrow, I'll sit down with you and go over the results, and we can figure out a plan.

"Are we finished for today?"

"Almost. Go on and have Nurse Ogawa prep you for the hydrotherapy pool. " 

The thought of him seeing her in a bathing suit, all skewed joints and rounded shoulders and skinny shanks flattened by years of sitting made her stomach roll, but dignity would not allow her to beg off, so she nodded and rolled out of the therapy room to find Nurse Ogawa.

A decontamination shower and ten minutes later, and she found herself stuffed into a silver bodysuit that bore a suspicious resemblance to Studio 54 haute couture.

 _You look like you've been in a losing fight with Reynolds Wrap,_ Grandmama noted wryly. _At least your derriere isn't hanging out. Apparently, folks have relearned modesty since the days of having dental floss lodged up your hind end._

Thank God for small mercies. Better to look like a plucked chicken in a roasting pan than to let him see the extent of her unloveliness. Some things he had to see by dint of his profession, but the rest she would keep to herself, buried beneath layers of fabric. She would never be the object of any man's desire or the stuff of his idle, slick-handed fantasies, and she could live with that cold truth as she had learned to do with so many others, but she would be damned if she would ever be an object of his pity.

She had just reached down to tug the snug fabric from her throat when Dr. McCoy emerged from his office. She froze, crooked finger lodged in her collar like a fish hook. If for her the suit was an abetting ally that concealed her sins and shortcomings, on the doctor, it was a revelation. It clung to him, molded itself to his sturdy legs and trim stomach and lean, defined chest. She gawped helplessly, mouth gone dry and rational thought blotted out by a wave of astonished lust as her gaze fell upon his thigh.

 _There's some meat on that bird,_ she thought stupidly, and willed her mouth to remain firmly shut.

 _Rosalie, honey, I do believe you've got your first official case of the vapors,_ her grandmother said, and chuckled. _And Lord have mercy, I can't say I blame you. He does cut a mighty fine figure. But it's impolite to stare, darlin', and you don't want to make him uncomfortable._

She shook herself and reluctantly raised her gaze to his face. He was mercifully occupied with the contents of his tablet and so had not noticed her wide-eyed scrutiny. _Thank God._

He tapped the screen twice and set it on the desk. "You ready to go?" he asked.

She swallowed to moisten her throat. "Whenever you are," she managed, and admonished herself not to let her gaze drift to her natural sight line, lest she end up with an eyeful of groin.

Oblivious to her discomfiture, he spun on his heel, and despite her noblest intentions, her eyes fell to the swell of his ass as he led her down the corridor. _I have never been so glad to see life at waist-level in all my life,_ she thought deliriously as the better angels of her nature tried in vain to raise her eyes to the small of his back, and followed him through the door and beyond the smothering confines of sickbay for the first time.

 

Unaware of the battle between his patient's conscience and her frustrated libido, Leonard McCoy led her down the gently-sloping corridor toward the turbolift. A session in the hydrotherapy pool would do her good. The evaluation had hardly been strenuous; in fact, he'd gone easier than he'd wanted in deference to the fragility of her miswired neuromuscular system, but there was still a good chance of soreness in the morning. It was clear from the preliminary results that she was unaccustomed to much movement. Her range of motion in all four extremities was severely stunted, and her hips had resisted any attempt to move them into an open position. As far as they were concerned, sitting was the natural position, and anything beyond ninety degrees was the work of the devil. The same went for her feet, which had marked trouble either straightening or bending past ninety degrees. She had spent her whole life folded in upon herself like a child's origami project, and smoothing out the misplaced creases was going to take time, patience, and a whole lot of work.

 _The stretching and exercises will help, but what she needs are half a dozen corrective releases,_ said the bloodless analyst inside his head. _Ankles, heels, and hips for certain. And her joints need restructuring, especially her hips. They're eaten up with arthritis, and a lifetime of sitting has warped them in the sockets. The anti-inflammatories and bone remineralization treatment I've started should stop the deterioration, maybe even reverse some of it, but if she keeps sitting, it'll just go right back to how it was._

 _Good luck selling her on more surgeries,_ grunted the gravelly voice of pessimism. _Getting her to agree to eight months of non-surgical rehab was like wrestling a bobcat for filet mignon. You come at her with a sales pitch involving multiple surgeries, and she's liable to call you a welsher and a no-good, lying son of a bitch and demand to be dropped on the nearest airless rock, never mind the starbase._

_Besides, from the looks of her, she's already seen more than her fair share of surgeries._

He'd seen the scars during his initial triage when they'd removed her from the cryotube. One set on her inner thighs, rough and wattled and white with age, and one on the backs of her knees, rough and fibrous beneath his probing fingertips. He'd thought them cold burns at first, the results of coolant leaking into the compartment, but they had been too uniform and too intimately placed, tucked into folds and creases that not even liquid could touch. It had taken him a moment to understand, and when he had, he'd simply stared, torn between incredulity and horror. He'd heard of the primitive surgical methods employed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, had seen ancient lithographs and grainy stills and video, but to see them in the flesh had been unnerving. He'd run his finger along the rough ridge of scar tissue, fascinated and appalled, and he'd been tempted to grab some surgical emolient and a contouring scalpel and repair them before she awoke. He hadn't in the end, prohibited by conscience and the protocols of consent, but he'd turned them over in his mind as he'd focused on the more pressing concern of shepherding her back to the land of the living safely. 

There'd been another scar in the center of her chest, a small, circular pucker between her breasts. He'd thought it was the mark from an ancient MMR vaccine, but he'd found that on her right shoulder, right where it should have been according to the medical history books. He'd spent hours poring through medical texts and archived medical files in search of an answer, but it as yet eluded him. He'd even considered the possibility of an old parasitic attachment, but nothing in her scans or bloodwork lent credence to that theory. Aside from the wreck of her ravaged skeletal system, she was a healthy woman.

_You could always ask her, you know. You're well within your rights as her doctor._

He could, and he would, but not today, and likely not anytime soon. It was low on the list of problems he wanted to address, and the time would be better spent building on the trust he'd begun to establish with her. It was fragile as spidersilk, bated breath and tentatively outstretched hand, and if he pushed too hard or spoke too soon, she'd shy from him like a spooked horse and never come back. Best now to let her find her feet in this strange new world that looked just enough like the old one to open hurts he couldn't see and prove himself a man of his word. Once she figured out he wasn't all flash, hot air, and empty promises, he could broach the subject of additional treatment.

 _It might be easier than you think,_ his father said. _She might not've leapt at the chance to let you cut on her, but she didn't dismiss it outright, either. In fact, I'd say she was thinking it over. That's one hell of an improvement from a couple of days ago, when she was hollering to raise the dead about you taking her blood while she was under._

He glanced behind him to see her following quietly in his footsteps, hugging the inside wall to let foot traffic pass. She was impossibly delicate in the too-big chair, and the sagging seat was playing hell with her already-poor posture, but she rolled doggedly along, quiet as the grave and just as solemn, the bony crooks of her arms slapping the armrests with every snap of her wrists.

_I don't understand how she's not screaming her fool head off. She's got to be hurting. Her hips are bone on bone, and her lumbar vertebrae aren't much better. She should be wracked with pain._

_Maybe she is. Maybe she keeps her mouth shut to keep the screaming in. No one likes a complainer, after all, especially not in polite society. Or maybe she's so used to it that she doesn't notice it anymore. You've seen a few of those in your time, horses that have foundered so badly that they walk on the bones of their forelegs because it's the only way they can walk at all. Cows who went right on chewing cud while their chapped and ulcerated udders festered. They'd done all the bellowing and whining they could, and when they realized help wasn't coming, they stopped wasting their energy and simply got on with it as best they could. Maybe she's just all screamed out._

_But help's here now,_ he protested.

_That may be, son, but she doesn't know that, not yet. She will. Just keep doing what you're doing. It's working._

"You can walk up here, you know," he said. "You don't have to creep in my shadow."

She started so hard he thought she was going to topple out of the chair, and an inexplicable blush rose in her cheeks and spread to the roots of her hair. "Oh, uh, all right," she muttered, and quickened her pace until she drew alongside him.

 _You'd think I'd reached out and goosed her,_ he thought, perplexed by her sudden and uncharacteristic bout of timidity, but he opted not to press the matter and simply kept moving toward the turbolift.

"You ever been in a hydrotherapy pool before?" he asked as he approached the doors to the lift.

"No. The closest I came was to my uncle's hot tub."

"Well, that ought to give you an idea." He stepped into the lift and waited for her to follow, but she didn't. She hung back, eyeing the door with fascinated trepidation. "What're you waiting for?"

"The door won't close on my ankles?" she asked dubiously.

"There's an obstruction sensor."

"Does it work?"

"It's a starship, not a junk freighter."

"I'll take that as a yes." She rolled into the lifted and pressed forward until her toes touched the opposite wall.

"You trying to kiss it?" He stepped to the side to give her more space. "Hydrotherapy room," he said, and it began its smooth descent.

"Just trying to maximize space in case others need to get on."

"Well, you can relax. We're the only passengers this trip."

A few seconds later, the doors opened on Deck Nine, and she blinked in surprise. "That was fast."

"Another perk of the future." He stepped out and joined the flow of human traffic that moved through the corridor. 

"If the hydrotherapy pools are part of the medical complex, why aren't they in sickbay?"

"They're not just for medical use. Anyone can use them if they book the time. Medical bookings take priority, and I can override appointments if I need to."

The hydrotherapy room housed half a dozen pools constructed from medical-grade steel and filled with sterile hot water. A control panel to the right controlled temperature and safety protocols, as well as the sling lift suspended in the corner above it. The room was empty as he'd requested, and all but one of the pools was turned off, their tops sealed against contaminants. The one nearest the door was on and open.

"Let me get the sling set up. Set your brakes." He moved to the control panel and keyed in his authorization code. The sling's motor hummed into obedient life, and it glided along its track in a soundless descent until its seat scraped the floor like the folds of a debutante's gown.

"Arms around my neck," he ordered when he returned to her side. "We'll work on the proper transfer later."

A small arm slithered around his neck and clung to it with deceptive strength, but she was light as birdbone and dreaming dust in his arms. Her legs jutted stiffly at awkward angles, and her fingers curled spasmodically into the fabric of his bodysuit. 

"I'm not going to drop you," he told her as she began to shudder and her nostrils began to flare. "I've got the steadiest hands in the fleet."

"Good thing for a surgeon to have," she said nervously, and flashed him a timid smile that disappeared as quickly as it formed.

"Good for a dairy farmer, too. Heifers aren't exactly forgiving of a misplaced hand." He eased her into the sling. 

She giggled, and he was surreptitiously glad of it. Her stress levels had been sky-high since she woke up, and even a med student could've felt the sudden spike of tension when the PT interns had made their appearance. She had gone from reasonably lax and pliable to rigid and unyielding in the blink of an eye, and no amount of kneading or patient cajoling with his hands had restored her suddenly-intransigent limbs to their former state of trusting passivity.

 _It's just easier,_ she said inside his head. _Not to look at them._

"Are you saying you think I'm a heifer, Doctor?" she asked innocently, but her thin mouth was curled into a mischievous smirk.

"What? No," he answered, flustered. "I'm just saying I'm not known for mishandling things."

She hummed speculatively at that, and her sly smirk only deepened.

The implications of what he'd said caught up with him, and he turned from her before he blushed like a schoolboy. "Hang on," he muttered peevishly. "Don't want you falling out when this thing rises." He stalked to the control panel and plotted the sling's course.

Rosalie was nothing if not obedient, and she curled her fingers around the sides of the sling as it rose and carried her to the tub. Another set of coordinates, and it lowered her into the water. She hissed at first contact, and her feet jerked away from the heat.

"Too hot?"

"It's just my nerves playing hell," came the reply, and her feet drooped once more.

He lowered the temperature a few degrees just to be on the safe side. "It's gonna set you down on a bench. Just hang on, and I'll be there in a second."

"Yes, Doctor."

He left the control panel and crossed to the pool, and then he stepped over the side and into the water. He drifted to where she sat upon the sling. "I'm going to raise you up so I can get this out from under you." He wrapped an arm around her hips and canted her forward to tug the sling from beneath her shanks. When it was free, he set her down again. "There." He pressed a button on the side of the sling, and it rose with a slosh of displaced water and returned to its original position, dripping water as it went.

"What now?" she asked.

"Now we sit. It'll keep you from getting too sore to get back at it tomorrow, and just between you and me, it'll do wonders for my back." He moved backward and sat on the bench adjacent to her.

Her brow furrowed in concern. "You haven't hurt yourself on my account, have you?" she asked in alarm.

"No, ma'am," he assured her. "To be honest, you don't weigh enough to do damage. The captain has more to do with it. Man's got me jumping off cliffs and dismantling seventy-two torpedoes cum cryotubes at a time. All the sitting behind a desk isn't doing me any favors."

"Maybe not, but I'm stuck on the part where you jumped off a cliff."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't my idea. Jim decided it would be a good idea to steal the religious scrolls from the local tribe who inhabited the planet we were surveying. If that weren't bad enough, the trigger-happy idiot stunned our ride. The villagers were hot on our trail, so it was either jump or end up skewered like a pair of ceremonial boars."

"And you serve under this guy?" she said incredulously.

"He has his flaws, but he's a damn good captain."

"I'll take your word for it. And if you don't mind me saying, Doctor, you sound awfully proud of that escapade."

"I'm just glad I came out of it in one piece," he retorted, but he couldn't help the brief flush of fond pleasure that accompanied the memory of running through a forest of red-leaved trees with Jim in front of him and a swarm of spear-toting natives on his heels. It had been absurd and stupid and terrifying, and he knew he had missed a painful, ignominious death by the fleetness of his churning feet, but it had been so quintessentially Jim, and he'd seldom been so alive as he'd been when he'd sailed over the edge of the Niburan world and plunged into the waters below.

Rosalie knew nothing of Jim, and so she merely shook her head and spread her palsied fingers beneath the surface of the water. He watched her study their movements as they opened and closed, the lazy pulsations of an albino jellyfish. Pensive and quiet again, and terribly remote.

"The water should help with your range of motion," he said. He knew she was probably sick of discussing and dissecting her frailties, but he didn't know what else to say. There were more than two hundred years between them, and professionalism demanded that he keep her at arm's length. Even so, his heart ached for her as she gazed at her bobbing, ungainly hand. He knew loneliness when he saw it, and isolation. She was a woman adrift, and there were no solicitous hands to pull her to shore.

"It does feel quite nice," she said, and raised her left foot as best she could.

Topics of acceptable conversation exhausted, they lapsed into silence. She sank into the water up to her chin and scissored her arms and legs in dreamy, uncoordinated circles, and he positioned himself in front of a jet and let the water work its magic. He had been sitting too much, absorbed by test results and research into ancient treatments of CP and similar conditions and comparable modern treatments that could be used to alleviate her symptoms. Not to mention the experiments he was conducting with the serum he'd synthesized from the blood collected from Khan and his people. Given that it could raise the recently-deceased, he was eager to see what else it could do, particularly when it came to the treatment of degenerative neurological conditions.

 _All you have to do is cure every neurocognitive disease in the universe, and maybe the voice will stop drifting out of your subconscious like way it used drift out of that room._ Please, son. Please. _The pitiful bleating of a dying sheep._

"I know they can't help it," she said quietly, and he was so grateful for the interruption that he didn't care that it made no sense.

"What?"

She paddled idly in the water for a moment before she answered. "I can't remember the last time people didn't look at me like that," she said diffidently. "Ever since I was little, there've been people staring at me, poking me, tugging on me. Most of the time, it doesn't hurt; it just feels...odd, like being touched by mechanical hands. Other kids got told they should protest if someone touched them in a way that they didn't like. I got told I had to let the strangers touch me because they were trying to help."

He opened his mouth to defend his profession's integrity, but his father spoke inside his head, a farmer calming an impetuous thoroughbred. _Wait, son. Just wait._

"I know they were, but..." She paused, and her index finger stirred the water as though sorting her thoughts. "I don't know. Even normal stuff was never really normal. Dentist appointment? Hey, let's bring the students in so they can observe the treatment of a patient with special needs. First pelvic exam at sixteen? Bring in the obgyn residents so they can get a look at how to handle atypical presentations and procedures. I'll never forget all those faces coming in to look at me while I was trussed up in the stirrups like a dressed turkey. There's my private business all out on public display, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it but lie there. A few of them even got the privilege of watching the gynecologist trying to force a speculum into-well, you can guess," she finished abruptly.

Yes, he could, and the images that presented themselves made his stomach roll.

"Sometimes I think that if I'd ever managed to have sex with someone I actually wanted to, they'd've observed that, too, maybe even have written a paper on it. Probably have given it a scholarly title, too. _The Copulatory Processes of the Congenitally Aberrant Female."_

 _...have sex with someone I actually wanted to._ The phrase resonated in his head and raised gooseflesh on his arms despite the heat of the water.

 _Oh, Lord, I think I'm seeing the wound now,_ he thought with numb nausea. _And I'm not sure I want to._

"All those strangers. Always looking, but none of them ever seemed to see me. They were nicer when I was younger. I guess kids are kids no matter how twisted they are. But when I got older..." She shrugged. "It always made me feel like a-" Her lips rounded, then flattened. "-science fair specimen."

 _That's not what you were gonna say,_ he thought shrewdly, but before he could respond, she spoke again.

"I know they've got to look if they're ever going to learn. I just wish they could see me somewhere in all this wreck." She flapped her misaligned arms.

He knew he should say something, but he could think of nothing that didn't smack of worthless platitudes and inept fumbling, so he took refuge in what he knew best. "I can change out Stuart for another female PT if you want," and God help him if he'd didn't sound like an insensitive fool.

"It wouldn't make much difference," she said. "It'd just mean another new set of eyes. Thank you kindly for the offer, though." 

He nodded brusquely. "Welcome. I think we've had enough for one day. Much longer, and we'll look like boiled prunes. Stay there while I get the sling."

She said nothing, but she tracked his movements as he got out of the pool and padded to the control panel, feet slapping on the floor and leaving wet footprints in his wake. He instructed the sling to retrace its earlier course, and then he retraced his and got back into the pool.

When the sling had dipped into the water, he eased over to Rosalie. "I'm going to raise you up and slip this under you."

She obediently placed her hands on his shoulders and allowed herself to be pulled toward him, and she made not a peep when he raised her hips and slipped the sling under her buttocks. Ordinarily, he would have been glad of her placidity, but there was an air of exhausted resignation to it that made his heart drop.

 _C'mon, sweetheart, don't you quit on me before we even start. Give me a chance._ "All right, I'm going to sit you back."

One arm curled around his neck, but she didn't sit up as he'd expected. She simply sat, cheek resting on his shoulder and palm pressed lightly between his shoulderblades. Her wet hair tickled his nose, and he could feel her breath on his neck. He knew he should disentangle himself, but she was tired, so very tired, a small bedraggled bird swamped by the surf and clinging to the only solid ground she could find. He thought of her trapped in those stirrups while gawking med students paraded through the cramped room and a jaded obgyn jammed a metal speculum between her legs. He thought of her lying on the therapy mat, rigid as a tentpole and face turned from that familiar, awful scrutiny. At least until he'd made her turn back.

He couldn't change the nature of the profession, could not shield her from their eyes or their impersonal mechanical hands with no tenderness in them, but he could give her a moment to catch her breath before she was thrown headlong to their fickle mercies, could offer her a point of contact that did not carry with it the burden of future price, and so he simply stood there and let her breathe, let her curl her fingers into the slick fabric of his bodysuit.

He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "I have to sit you up now, Miss Walker."

"I know," she said softly, but she made no move to sit up, and it was even longer before he reached for the buttons on the side of the sling.


	6. Strays

Dr. Leonard McCoy swept into sickbay with a spring in his step and his arms full of long-awaited booty. After mulling it over for a while, the replicator had finally coughed up the AFOs, shoes, and padd he'd ordered for Miss Walker. It was still working on the wheelchair he'd designed for her, but it, too, would be done in a day or so, and then he could see about correcting her horrifying posture and alleviating some of the stress on her joints. Five days into her stay and three days into the PT regimen he'd recommended, it was clear that she was in pain, and never mind the Loxtan or the anti-inflammatories with which he injected her every morning. She never said boo about it, never whined or begged off of the daily routine, but it was evident by her pinched face and slumped shoulders and the constant, uneasy shift of her body in the ill-fitting wheelchair as she gazed out the window at the unchanging vastness of space. 

_All the AFOs in the galaxy aren't going to end her pain,_ pointed out the calculating clinician inside his head. _What she needs is surgery, and more than a little. You can encase her in plastic and metal to the eyeballs like some space-age mummy, and all it'll do is postpone the inevitable. If she doesn't go under the knife, she'll be all but immobile within ten years, and so wracked with pain, life will hardly be worth living._

 _And I told you that I'm not pushing her on it,_ he shot back. _Not right now. If she's not ready for it, I'm not going to to be like those callous bastards on those godawful films and back her into a corner just because I can. I'm not going to force her. She's not a lab rat who doesn't know what's happening to her. She damn well does know, and she's exhausted and scared and looking for a place to sort out the mess she's in, and if I push her too hard to fast, I could do more harm than good. There's no point in mending her body just to break her spirit._

 _That may be,_ conceded the dry voice of his inner attending physician. _But if you wait too long, it might be out of your hands. You've got a good heart, Doctor, but I'll remind you that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. See that it doesn't lead your feet to that unfortunate piece of asphalt._

 _And I'll remind you that the first rule of my profession is to first do no harm,_ he countered waspishly. _There's been enough harm done already._

He remembered the weight of her as she'd leaned against him in the hydrotherapy pool, head on his shoulder and small arm around his neck. She'd sagged against him as though she lacked the strength to even raise her head. No strength, no hope, just water dripping from the ends of her hair and her fingers bunching loosely in the fabric of his wetsuit and her breath against his neck. She'd been fragile and floundering and holding on for dear life, and he'd wanted to bundle her up and take her home and feed her his mama's pot roast, but he'd only squeezed her shoulder and eased her up into the sling and sent her back to her chair. She'd followed him back to sickbay without a word, and she'd gone with Nurse Ogawa just as quietly when she'd ordered her into the bathroom to change out of her wetsuit. Orderly and neat as you please, and it had broken his heart.

It still ached to see her now, truth be told. She was too quiet, a ghost inside her skin as she went about her daily routine. She spoke when spoken to and was polite to the nurses who shepherded her through the tasks of bathing and dressing and combing her long hair, but she offered nothing of herself and seldom smiled. No chit-chat, no laughter, just stolid, plodding obedience and stiff-necked stoicism as she watched the world through wary blue eyes.

Worst of all was the slumped resignation with which she followed the PT interns into the therapy room. That first morning, she'd hesitated when they'd come for her, had turned in her chair and looked at him as though to say, _Do I have to? Are you really going to make me do this?_ When he'd only eyed her levelly over the rack of test tubes currently perched on the edge of his desk, she'd nodded as though that were what she'd expected and squared her shoulders. A sigh almost too soft to hear, and then she'd followed Yeoman Stuart into the therapy room, sharp chin thrust thrust forward in grim defiance, a prisoner following her wardens to the gallows. _Chin up and shoulders back._ He could almost hear the admonition as she'd disappeared into the room, and he'd felt a dull pang of guilt as the door had closed behind her.

The ensuing rehab session had hardly soothed his uneasy conscience. He'd kept an eye on it via the observation system at his desk while he'd catalogued various bacteriological samples they'd collected on their last away mission, and though his hands had remained steady at their task, assigning specimen numbers in his small, precise hand, his heart had dropped inside his chest. Stuart and Connor were fine, conscientious yeomen, and he could find no fault with their technique. It was textbook, in fact, crisp and professional and firm. And yet...

_And yet, it made your stomach turn to see her lying there with her palms pressed to the vinyl of the therapy mat and her eyes squeezed shut against the intrusion of their hands on her body. You didn't need the bioscan readings or the increasingly-exasperated exhortations of Connor and Stuart to tell you she was in distress. It was written all over her face and in the hard, unbending lines of her body as they pulled her this way and stretched her that way, in the pallor of her cheeks and the furrows in her forehead. At one point, Connor rolled her onto her side and straightened her tugged her arm until it was straight out in front of her, and she bit her lip as if to stifle a cry. Her eyes opened for just a moment, bleak and disgusted and so very tired. She seemed to be looking right at you. You knew she wasn't; she had no idea the cameras were even there, but the feeling persisted until she closed her eyes again, and you turned off the monitor and buried yourself in your test tubes and tried not to think of her clinging to you in the hydrotherapy pool, or of dying horses pawing feebly at the churned mud of their reeking stalls._

It made me feel like a- _she said inside your head, and her lips rounded with the word your imagination could tease out if it cared to, and the unfinished thought reverberated inside your skull while you pretended to care about a diatomic bacterial sample you'd scraped from a dry riverbed two weeks before Rosalie Walker and her ancient disability floated into your lap in her battered cryotube._

 _It didn't get much better when she trudged out of there forty-five minutes later(until then, you didn't know people in wheelchairs_ could _trudge, but damned if she didn't manage it), sweaty and silent and with her gaze fixed on the heels of Stuart's shoes. She didn't say a word, just followed Ogawa into the shower and left you to your post-session consult. You hoped she'd brighten up once she came out of the shower, freshly-scrubbed and free of their analytical scrutiny, but she was no better. She just parked herself beside her bed and let Ogawa brush her hair. She looked like a goddamn mannequin for all the life she showed, and you were so spooked by that godawful blankness that you ordered a bowl of blackberry cobbler from the replicator and told her to eat it. You muttered some plausible-sounding bullshit about her needing to replenish her caloric intake and keep her electrolytes in balance, but in truth, you just wanted to see some semblance of life in her face, some proof that her head hadn't slipped beneath the water while no one was looking._

_At first, you were afraid that wasn't going to work, either, that she was just going to sit there like a hunk of statuary until the nurses wrangled her into bed that night, but then she picked up the spoon and dipped the end into the thick, syrupy sludge of macerated blackberries._

Never thought I'd see a doctor who prescribed sweets, _she murmured, and took a bite, and the knot in the center of your chest loosened because sass was a sign of life. She was still on edge--her elevated stress levels were proof of that--but she wasn't ready to throw in the towel and topple headlong over it._

Don't get used to it, _you grumbled, and took yourself to your desk. You spent the rest of your shift watching her from the corner of your eye while you finished catalogiung your samples and wrote preliminary reports on the ones you'd examined. She finished the cobbler and licked the spoon and asked for a glass of water, which you were only too happy to give her, and then she spent most of the next seven hours rolling up and down the aisle, an animal restlessly pacing the confines of her cage. She seemed so small, diminished, as though Stuart and Connor had torn a piece of her away with every touch of their hands. Maybe that's what drove her to wear grooves into the sickbay floor with the tread of her wheels. She was looking for the parts of herself that they had so unthinkingly carried away and trying to piece herself back together before they came back for more and reduced her to nothing but wisps of hair and bones worn smooth by the grip of impersonal hands._

_Sometimes she offered you a shy, fleeting smile when she turned at your desk to begin another circuit, and it was all you could do not to drop your test tubes and bury your face in your hands, because she was trying so hard to be good, to be keep her chin up and her cheeks dry. To be a lady and preserve the insulted tatters of her dignity as long as she could. Ladies were polite. Ladies smiled even when all they wanted to do was scream and cry and carry on until they wanted to throw up. A good lady never broke, no matter how much it hurt._

_And whatever else this cold, inaccessible world of grey walls and narrow doors and ruthlessly-tugging hands determined to shape her into something better, something more acceptable to its unforgiving shape made of her, she would be a lady. A lady in a cage without even the illusive comfort of gilded bars and shafts of sunlight slanting through the windows._

Well, her cage was about to get a little bigger. He couldn't give her sunlight or its warmth on her face or days without the tug and knead of demanding hands, but he could give her a window of sorts. The padd he carried would afford her a glimpse of the world that waited for her down below and a means to escape the monotony of routine and the tedium of staring at the vast expanse of nothingness. She could study any subject that captured her fancy to her heart's content, could follow it down the labyrinthine rabbit hole of cross references and suggested readings and let her mind focus on something other than the less-than-thrilling prospect of her current circumstances. She could write her own papers on the subject if she wanted, and if he were lucky, it would draw her out of her jealously-guarded shell and get her talking for more than five minutes at a time and about something other than long-term prognoses and the endless grind of humiliating therapy sessions. Stir-craziness was as deadly as an unchecked aneurysm, and he was determined to keep her mind as active as possible.

 _Of course you are,_ sneered an oily, malevolent voice inside his head. _You've seen what happens to minds gone to rot, haven't you? To birds left too long in their well-intended cages?_

 _Please, son. Please,_ pleaded another voice, and he turned from it and back to the safer business of seeing to a patient he could still save, whose pain he could still ease.

She was sitting by the observation window now, dressed in the light scrubs that served as her wardrobe and blinking dully at the unchanging landscape beyond the open partition. She turned her head at the sound of his approach and offered him a polite smile.

"Hello, Doctor," she said softly.

"I come bearing gifts," he announced, and nodded to the jumble in his arms. 

"Really?" She straightened as best she could and studied the contents with interest. 

He dropped into a squat in front of her chair. "Don't kick me in the face," he said, and began to arrange the various items at her feet.

A huff of amusement. "Now that you've said it, I'm more likely to do it since I get more spastic when I'm nervous." She released the brakes on her chair and retreated a few paces before setting them again.

"I'll keep that in mind." He scuttled forward and held out a hand. "Before we try on your new AFOs, I want to see your feet."

She thrust out one socked foot, and he cradled the fragile heel in his palm and peeled back the sock. She shivered and started in the chair, and her toes curled and fanned in a helpless, fretful arrhythmia.

"I'm not going to amputate it," he grumbled, but his touch was gentle as he drew the tip of his index finger along the skin to test sensation and elasticity. Her foot stiffened and jerked at the touch, unaccustomed to such stimulation, but he merely held on until she relaxed. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"I know."

The quiet confidence in it surprised him, but he betrayed nothing. He merely traced another exploratory line along her instep and a third on the sole that nearly earned him the kick in the face he had hoped to avoid. The skin there was soft as a newborn's and just as sensitive; it was also, he noted with approval, much pinker than it had been when he'd first laid eyes on them in the cryotube, where they'd been a mottled, alarming purple that had prompted fears of gangrene or frostbite or diabetic necrosis. Her foot was far less swollen as well, and warm as it rested in his palm. The muscle relaxants and stretching were clearly doing their work.

He replaced the sock and returned her foot to the footrest, and she dutifully presented the other. It was an oddly imperious gesture, and he bit back a grin as he inspected her dainty offering. Like its counterpart, it showed evidence of improvement, pink and warm and vital beneath his fingertips. He pulled up the sock and lowered her foot to its customary resting place. "They look much better," he told her, and chafed the flesh through the thick cotton. He wanted to get her used to frequent stimulus. She'd never walk without help, but she'd be standing if he could help it, and it wouldn't do to have her break her damn neck because the texture of bare floor or carpet was too much for her sheltered nerves. 

"I can't speak to how they look, but they certainly feel better. They're usually so cold." She waggled her toes inside the sock.

"Most things do better with proper circulation. Hold out your hands?"

She obeyed, a lady presenting her favor to a suitor, and he examined her nail beds with a hum of satisfaction. "Better here, too." He released her hand and turned his attention to her AFOs, which lay at his feet like a pair of denuded severed limbs. "You're making progress, Miss Walker."

"Please. That's hardly my doing, Dr. McCoy. You should be laying it at the feet of those muscle relaxants."

"It's not just the Loxtan. If it was, the effects would be temporary and would take longer. The stretching you've been doing has loosened the muscles and made it easier for the blood to get where it needs to go. Give yourself a little credit."

"It's only been three days. I could still make a mess of it."

"You could," he agreed, and reached for an AFO. "And if and when you do, I'll be glad to ride your a-butt right back into line."

She giggled, and her feet splayed restively on the footplates. "God bless your honesty," she said fondly.

"I'm glad you appreciate it," he replied gruffly, and held out his hand for her left foot, which she duly supplied. "You're probably the only one around here who does."

"Somehow, I doubt that," she retorted shrewdly, and the frankness startled him.

 _She's not wrong, son._ His mother's voice, light and brisk, and he was struck by a momentary pang of homesickness. _Ain't nothing wrong with honesty, either. Your Daddy and I raised you to it, you and George both. Even as a youngun, you were prone to it, sometimes to a fault. More than a few times, your Daddy had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing when you offered up your opinions on a matter. He damn near choked himself to death when you were four years old and told Mrs. Gwinnett that the new hairdo of which she was so proud at the monthly summer social looked like the shave on old Mr. Hobart's poodle, and I liked to have died when you told Miss Florence that her pie tasted like rhubarb and drywall when she offered you a taste just before the pie contest when you were six._

_It took some patience and a run of weekends mucking stalls and sweeping floors and helping me with the sewing instead of playing at the creek out back of the house, but it wasn't too long before you understood the difference between forthrightness and just plain meanness, and you never took pleasure in your few steps across the line; in fact, you took pains not to hurt anyone if you could help it, and if you did, well, I've never seen a more contrite soul in all my life._

_You might've rubbed a few folks the wrong way with your bald honesty--Mrs. Gwinnett, for instance, who gave you the stink eye until the day you left for college, or poor Miss Florence, who was so upset by your assessment of her pie that she drew herself up and left without entering it into the competition. She never offered you a bite of anything ever again, though as I recall, she softened considerably once you were thirteen and mowing her yard every week and taking special care not to chew up her prized rosebushes--but most people respected it. Your father surely did, and nothing made him prouder than to sit on the porch a spell after work and talk to you. He knew you'd never insult him with a lie, and he loved you for it, so much. I did, too. While all the other mothers down the ladies' auxiliary fretted about what their boys weren't telling them and swapped stories of searching their rooms for signs of secret girlfriends or some bit of dangerous tomfoolery, like beer or a stolen phaser, I never had to worry about any such nonsense, because I knew my Leo would never lie to me. You were a good boy, you see, and it just wasn't in you to be any way else._

_That honesty kept you out of trouble, too. Your common sense and unwillingness to suffer fools kept you away from folks who weren't worth your time or the damn to spare for them. Like those oafs at the University of Missouri who wasted their time boozing and carousing and washed out by the end of their freshmen year with nothing to show for it by the pounds they'd put on. Or the stuffed shirts at the Academy who thought the only reason to go into space was to see what they could take from it and try to civilize the ignorant, savage aliens while they were at it, and never mind that a lot of them had been sailing the stars for a far bit longer than upstart humans. Your reputation kept you out of that mess with Jim, too, the one that would've gotten him bounced out of Starfleet if that crazy Romulan, Nero, hadn't picked just then to lose his mind and try to obliterate the Federation. You were the first person they started looking at when that pointy-eared fellow kicked up the dickens about his test being tampered with. He was sure Kirk had had help with his ridiculous little stunt, and who better to suspect than his best friend?_

_They dragged you before the committee with the sleep still in your eyes and the tats still in your hair to grill you about what you knew and when you knew it, and all you could do was stand there at attention in your cadet dress reds and tell the truth. They were skeptical at first, but you had a parade of professors and fellow students willing to testify to your good name, and it wasn't long before you were just a bewildered bystander to the whole sorry affair, watching Jim lie in the uncomfortable bed he'd made for himself and hoping his mouth and cocky attitude didn't get him in more trouble._

_So much for that dream,_ he thought wryly as he guided Rosalie's twitching foot into the molded plastic of the AFO and fastened the magnetic strap across her ankle. "Too tight?" he asked.

"No."

 _That honesty of yours has saved others, too,_ his mother went on proudly. _Like those girls you sometimes rescued from the Academy cadets who plied them with alcohol and then tried to sweet-talk them home. You certainly weren't above flirting; you're a grown man with needs and wants, after all, but you never saw the appeal of bedding a woman who'd count you as nothing but a shameful regret in the morning, so you never tried your luck with anyone who looked to be three sheets to the wind. Your classmates were seldom so discriminating, and you found yourself running interference for young ladies who'd gotten in over their heads, prying them from the grips of their would-be Romeos. You even had to save one from Jim once, though to his credit, he was equally smashed and just trying to work his cocksure magic. He desisted with boozy magnanimity once you got his glassy eyes to focus, and he even apologized to her before wobbling back to your table, where he gaped at you in chummy, doe-eyed adoration until you set your own unfinished drink down in disgust and dragged him back to the dorm to sober up. He was all throbbing head and sheepish contrition the next morning, wheedling for a hangover cure on the way to morning mess, and like you always do, you gave in. Because it was Jim, and because back then, he was about the only thing you had left._

_And for all his flaws, Jim was always there. When the cadets whose bad intentions you thwarted bowed up and threatened to cave your head in with a barstool, he was there with his loud mouth and his fists at the ready, and if you found yourself on the losing end of a fight, he was there to pick you up and dust you off and commiserate about the shiner you were sporting. If you weren't, he slapped you heartily on the back and helped you see the lady home. Now and then, you had to remind him not to flirt with a girl heaving the night's excess into the gutter while you held her hair and awkwardly patted her back, but most nights, he was the perfect boy scout, hovering over her while you called a cab or poured her into the arms of her friends._

_The other boys at the Academy sneered behind their hands and called you a goodie-goodie, but the young ladies knew you were someone to rely on. They trusted you, respected you, and every once in a while, one would come up to you on the green with her padd clutched to her chest and thank you for seeing her friend or her sister or her cousin out of a bad situation. Sometimes, the face looking back at you from behind the soft fall of hair was the same one that had been spewing vomit onto your shoes the night before, and she'd stammer and murmur and blush to the roots, and ever the gentleman, you'd put her at ease with a smile and a ma'am and a shuffle of your feet. Sometimes, your gallantry earned you a date, but you were still raw from the hurt Pamela had put you through, so it was rarely more than a polite dinner and a kiss on the cheek. Sometimes it was, and it was sweet while it lasted, but like you told Jim that day on the transport shuttle, you were down to your bones, so there wasn't much of you to spare for someone with stars in their eyes and high expectations, and most of them moved on._

_I'm not sure what this has to do with my smart mouth,_ he told her as he slipped the AFO onto Rosalie's other foot and fastened the strap. 

_Well, it just speaks to your nature, sweetheart. You're honest because you've got a good heart. This little thing here ain't been around you five days, but she senses it. So does Jim, which is why you're usually one of the first people he comes to when he's got a problem or a decision to make. Even that Spock fellow respects you, for all the pompous grumbling he does about you. They both do. They know your heart's in the right place even if it's attached to a sharp tongue, and they trust it. It's one of the few smart things that Jim boy's ever done._

He smiled wistfully at his mother's ringing endorsement and slipped the modified shoe over the AFO. "This is the shoe I talked about," he said as he fastened the buckle. "It's got a lift in the sole itself so you don't have to worry about slipping it in and out every morning."

"What if I want more than one pair of shoes?" 

He blinked. "Then I suppose we'll just have to replicate you another pair. It's easy enough." He lowered her foot. "Set your brakes. I want to check the fit and balance."

She did so and swung out her footplates for good measure.

"You a shoe fan?" he asked as he held out his hands.

"Not really," she answered as she took his hands. "But just because you can't stand up doesn't mean you want to look like a hospital matron all the time."

He had no answer for that, and so he simply said, "On three."

She rose unsteadily to her feet and rested her hands on his shoulders to balance herself. Her hips swayed for a moment, bewildered by the shift in their customary position, and then they stilled. She was upright and far straighter than she had been, though there was still a tendency to lean forward. Weak lumbar and trapezius muscles, no doubt, but that could be corrected with continued therapy, and if that didn't help enough, then they could try a temporary brace that would force her to hold herself straight and gradually reprogram a lifetime of muscle memory.

"How does that feel?"

She considered. "Odd," she said at last. "The ground feels different under my feet."

"That's because you're actually standing on your feet instead of the insole or instep. Without the braces, your ankles and knees collapse, and you end up pronating. It's a wonder you haven't blown your ACLs half a dozen times. It also helps that your hips are level. You've probably been compensating for years to make up for the length difference between your legs. I'm guessing that's why the longer leg hyperextends more than the other. I've also noticed that your left Achilles is a lot tighter than your right. It's because the heel of the shorter leg hardly bears weight or touches the floor. Heightens your risk of rupture."

"And these shoes will fix all that," she said dubiously.

"It'll be more gradual than surgery, but it will improve things for you if you keep up with the rehab."

"I don't think my calves or ankles like this much," she said, and shifted her weight from one foot to the other and back again.

"Why?"

"It burns and aches."

"It probably will for a while. As bad as they are for you, those off-kilter positions are what they're used to, and they're going to fight the changes. It's uncomfortable, and you're going to be tempted to rip these off and hurl them against the wall, but I need you to wear them as much as possible. You can take them off at night and on lazy Sunday mornings, but other than that, you need to keep them on."

"How do you even know when it's Sunday around here?" She gazed around the room at walls that boasted neither clock nor calendar.

"Padds show date and time. So do the ship's computers. "It's Thursday morning, if you were wondering."

"I was." She shifted again. Her legs began to tremble with incipient muscle exhaustion. "Why does it feel like there are hot nails being driven into the bottoms of my feet?" She lifted one foot from the floor and stamped like an impatient foal.

"Your bones are still thin, and don't take this as an insult, but you've got bony feet. Not much padding to absorb the weight."

"I feel pretty, oh, so pretty," she sang dourly under her breath, and he once again found himself treading awkward and unfamiliar ground.

"Let's sit you down before your legs give out," he said, and eased her back into the chair. Her spindly legs juddered and twitched on the footplates, temporarily out of her control as muscles unaccustomed to such hard work sent out strident distress signals. She sat rigid as a tentpole in the sagging seat, fingers curled around the armrests. Her face was flushed, whether from exertion or shame, he could not tell.

 _You've got nothing to be ashamed of, sweetheart,_ he thought as he undid the buckle of her shoe. _I know you're doing the best you can._ "It's called clonic spasm," he said as he pulled off her sock. "It's common for CP as far as I can tell. It's nothing you can control."

She surveyed him in inscrutable silence. "Okay."

"What I trying to tell you is that there's no point in being ashamed of it," he said brusquely.

Her mouth twitched. "I suppose you can't blame someone for getting the runs from a bad burger, either, but I imagine they'd still be embarrassed as hell if they messed themselves in public," came the brisk reply, and she gazed down at him from behind long, blonde lashes.

He could find no fault with her logic, and so he busied himself with an examination of her bare foot. There was a pressure indent on the sole, and he was certain it would give way to a bruise by dinnertime, a smarting souvenir from her first foray into standing and proper posture. Well, there wasn't much he could do about it; until her feet toughened up, they were an occupational hazard. Of more pressing concern was a hot spot on her talus. "That hurt?" He gave it an experimental prod with the tip of his finger.

Her emphatic flinch was all the answer he needed. An examination of her other foot yielded the same result. He picked up the AFOs and rose from his crouch. "Sit tight," he ordered, and carried them to his desk. He shoved his padd out of the way with an impatient sweep of his hand and set the braces in its place. Then he went to the supply cabinet, keyed in his code, and began to rummage among the various rolls and packets of gauze, cotton batting, and compresses. One by one, he inspected and rejected them all. He even considered the possibilities afforded by a hunk of foam shoved into the dim recesses of the cabinet's rear, but that he dismissed as too rigid. He tossed it back with a sigh. It was all either too flimsy for the job or too abrasive.

 _Well, hell,_ he thought, hands on his hips and eyes fixed on the contents of the cabinet as though he could conjure a suitable material through sheer force of will.

 _There's always the replicator,_ suggested the unflappable voice of practicality.

He grunted and slammed the door to the uncooperative cupboard, and when he had reengaged the lock, he stalked to the hapless replicator mounted in the wall behind his desk. He jabbed a finger at the keypad, then stopped, considering.

_What would you use to cushion your bony feet if some jackass told you you had to encase them in plastic every day for the rest of your life?_

His finger hovered in front of the keypad for a moment, and then he punched in his selection. _Please wait,_ the machine pleaded as it processed his request. _Estimated time of completion: 2 minutes._ He rolled his eyes and heaved a put-upon sigh at its crotchety intransigence.

"It'll be ready in a few," he called as he scowled at replicator, which, unfazed by his cantankerousness, simply clacked and ground along on its appointed rounds.

"It's fine. It's not like I have anyplace I need to be," she answered mildly. "It seems to go a lot faster with food."

"Food is composed of much simpler compounds."

"So is that how you make everything in the world these days? With replicators?"

"I suppose you could if you had one big enough, and there are a few industrial replicators, but most things are still manufactured by humans. We have to have something to do now that we've stopped killing each other."

"We have?" she said with blank incredulity.

"You sound surprised."

"That's because I am. When I went into the human cannery, the Ukraine had dissolved into a maelstrom of civil war and bioterror attacks that spawned rumors of zombies shambling across the earth, the U.S. was in the grips of an evangelical hysteria that threatened to swallow sanity and civil order whole, Mexico was a morass of starving, broke people caught in the crossfire of at least a dozen different drug cartels, and people were merrily shooting each other for the crime of getting lost at night or asking for help after a car accident."

"Zombies?" he repeated incredulously.

"Yeah. They were big at the time. You know, _Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z._ Well, no, I don't guess you would know," she said thoughtfully. "Trust me, they were big back then. And then when reports came in about people eating the family dog alive while high on bath salts or chewing their mother's face off while high on Spice, or the ones about drug addicts decomposing alive because of Krokodil, suddenly it didn't seem so crazy that dead folks might've popped up for a second go-round."

 _Jesus Christ, what kind of sick, apocalyptic hell were you living in?_ he wondered as the timer on the replicator ticked steadily downward. 

"So, when did we finally stop blowing each other to hell?"

"2053. Once most of the planet received a hot dose of radiation, people figured out that maybe reaching for the button every time a disagreement broke out was a bad idea."

"You don't say?"

He snorted. "Yeah, well, people have always a little slow on the uptake. If they weren't, I wouldn't be seeing cases of suppurating flesh wounds that could've been treated in a second if they hadn't tried to play doctor with the butter."

"Butter?"

"You don't want to know." 

The replicator chirped and spat out a swatch of soft fleece. This he carried to his desk, where he seated himself in his chair and angled his reading lamp to shine on the center of the desk. He set the braces aside and spread the swatch in the bright square of light. Then he opened the topmost drawer of his desk and took out an old laser scalpel and a cauterizer.

"If we had a grand time of it blowing ourselves up, then what's left of Earth?" she asked, no doubt envisioning miles of cratered, blackened earth where her world had once been.

"The planet's fine," he grunted as he smoothed the soft fabric. "There were a few geographical changes, and there were a few rough years until we made First Contact. The Vulcans helped with the reconstruction efforts."

"The Vulcans? Isn't that what the elf said he was?"

"His name is Spock," he reminded her. "And yes." When the swatch was as smooth and straight as he could manage, he pinned the top corners with his empty coffee mug and his padd and reached for the laser scalpel.

_Yes, best not to tell her that the Atlanta she remembers, the cradle of her interrupted life, was vaporized in a mushroom cloud of toxic dust and scalding ash, or that most of the institutions and landmarks of her childhood are gone, replaced by ones she cannot possibly understand. That would do wonders for her already-rocky equilibrium._

_And just wait until she learns about Philip Greene._

He winced at the thought as he flicked on the scalpel and carefully cut a small oval from the bottom. With any luck, she'd never hear that name, never have cause to wonder why it was spoken with such distaste, children fearfully invoking the bogeyman they knew to lurk under their bed.

 _And if she does?_ needled the perpetual town crier inside his head who wailed of shuttle crashes and industrial accidents and shattered skulls yet to come. _She's smart as a whip and curious besides, and based on that never-ending treatise she wrote on your intelligence test, she knows how to investigate and correlate and follow the trail of breadcrumbs laid by those who have gone before. How long's it going to be before she's scrolling through the mountain of information about World War III and sees the references to a post-atomic terror? And how long after that before she stumbles across his name and reads about the great eugenics purge of the impure and broken and undesirable? What will she think when she realizes that people really haven't changed all that much, that a lot of them would be glad if folks like her never made a comeback, if they remained an unfortunate relic of history?_

 _I can't protect her from the world,_ he countered. He put the small oval on the hard surface of his desk to let it cool and rose from his chair to retrieve a tube of medi-adhesive from a tray behind him. It was ordinarily used to treat minor cuts too small for a suture but too deep for a steri-strip, but it would do nicely for what he had in mind. _I could try. I could censor what she read and sanitize her archive searches, but sooner or later, she'd find herself on Earth with a box of replicated clothes and a padd and the address of an intake center, and it would still be there for her to find. It would still hurt just as badly, maybe more because she never saw it coming. At least if she finds out about it here, she'll have people to talk to and time to figure out how to feel about it._

He sat down at his desk again, unscrewed the cap of the adhesive, and daubed a few beads of the clear, viscous liquid onto the perimeter.

"What are you doing?"

"Making a pad for your talus bones," he answered without looking up. "If I don't, you're liable to rub yourself raw and develop ulcers."

"Been there," she said. "They used to use this foam stuff."

"I thought we'd try this. Figured it might be more comfortable."

"Are you going to put it on the ankle straps, too? Sometimes they cut into my skin if my feet swell."

"You shouldn't have much problem with swelling anymore," he said, but his eyes slid to the underside of the straps as they lay on the desk like strips of debrided flesh, and his mind was already calculating the measurements. No harm in being safe, and giving her something familiar was so much the better. He picked up the nearest brace and pressed the fabric onto the plastic before the adhesive could dry.

"I'm surprised you need to," she noted. "I thought that wand you used was accurate to the micromillimeter. There was no accusation in her tone, and when he chanced a glance at her as he reached for the cauterizer, she was sitting much straighter in the chair, and her eyes were alive with interest. There was even a bit of color in her cheeks, a development that pleased him to no end.

"It is. Most people don't move when I use it. And if you're going to apologize, don't," he said firmly, because he could feel it coming. "As you can see, it's nothing we can't get around." He turned on the cauterizer and used it to strengthen the seal between the fleece and the plastic. The air filled with the acrid stink of singed plastic, and he wrinkled his nose in reflexive disgust.

"You're pretty good at that," Rosalie observed, and coughed against the stench.

"I am a trained surgeon," he answered mildly as he traded the cauterizer for the laser scalpel and cut another oval from the fleece. "Besides, my mother taught me how to sew."

"Did she? Did you always know you wanted to be a doctor, then?"

"From pretty young, I guess. I was about eleven or so when the thought first entered my mind. Before that, I thought about being a vet. Came natural with being on a farm. I used to go with my dad around the farm during calving season. I can still turn a calf if I have to."

"Something that comes up often, is it?" she said lightly, and when he looked up, she was smiling. Not the tired, timid smile of reflex and social obligation, but a genuine smile that reached her eyes and softened her face.

He was so surprised that he nearly squirted adhesive onto his sleeve. "Not so much these days," he managed, and pressed the oval into the plastic. "Before Starfleet, I used to help out on the farm when I could. Milk, turn calves, treat for hoof rot." The cauterizer made another appearance, and he braced for another round of the caustic stink.

"So sewing was your mama's contribution to your medical career?"

"Sewing was my mother's cure for smartass," he answered wryly, and damned if she didn't laugh. Her shoulders shook as she clutched the arms of her chair and belly-laughed. It was a lively, merry sound, and so unexpected after days of morose silence and humorless grunts that several of the nurses turned their heads in surprise, half-fluffed pillows and trays of fresh hypos in their hands.

"She contributed plenty to my career," he said, pleased to see this change in her demeanor. "She's a smart woman. She taught me to read before I ever made it kindergarten, and she made sure I read a little of everything. Her father was a doctor, and she used to let me play with his old stuff. He had this old bioscanner the size of a cowbell that I used to play with-"

"Bioscanner?" she interrupted blankly. 

"The thing I'm always waving over your head."

"Oh, the salt shaker," she said cheerfully. "All right."

"Yeah, the salt shaker," he muttered drily. "Not like it takes skill to operate or education to interpret the readouts properly. Anyway, he had one the size of an old cowbell, and I used to carry it around the house, diagnosing everyone with various dire diseases."

She giggled. "I take it you cured them."

"I was the best doctor in three counties," he said with a surge of childhood pride.

"I just bet you were," she said softly, and he knew that she was picturing him as he was, knee-high to a grasshopper and sporting a cowlick and carrying that brick of a bioscanner in both hands as he solemnly diagnosed his brother with Andorian scurvy _and_ colorectal pinworms.

"Like I said, she contributed plenty to my career," he said, and cut two more strips of fleece from the rapidly-dwindling swatch. "Sewing just wasn't part of it. Threaded sutures went out before the twenty-second century. Though I guess it did come in handy for that project in my History of Pre-Federation Medicine course," he mused. "We had to stitch up various animals with whatever material we had on hand. The cow was a cinch. The tadpole was a bit trickier."

"Tadpole?" she echoed.

"Of course. How else to test your fine motor skills?"

"I'm sure I couldn't tell you."

"Tadpoles. Well, that's how Dr. Kramer did it, anyhow." He glued the strips of fleece to the ankle straps and pressed them together to form a tight seal. "What about you? What did you want to be?"

"Oh, all kinds of things. A mermaid, a ninja, a princess, a mighty warrior queen. I had quite the imagination. When I got a little older, I wanted to be a detective. But you couldn't do much detecting back then if you couldn't sneak around, and I had the stealth capabilities of a Sherman tank."

He snorted in amusement and carried the braces to her chair, where he resumed his crouch and held out his hand. A small foot was promptly presented.

"It wasn't until middle school that I took up the idea to be a teacher," she said, as he slipped her foot back into the AFO, the prince presenting a glass slipper to Cinderella. "I couldn't run or sew or cook. I couldn't even wipe my own behind half the time, but I could learn. That I could do, and better than the little turds who made fun of me. So I set my mind to it and learned my butt off. Science, English literature and grammar, languages. You name it, and sir, I learned it. If I couldn't earn respect any other way, then maybe I could get it that way, and I figured that if I could learn it, then maybe I could teach it, too. I loved most of my teachers, and I wanted to be just like them."

He thought of the essay she'd written for his intelligence test, clear and concise and often starkly beautiful in its prose. Beauty wasn't a trait often found in historical treatises, but there it had been, fine as diamond dust scattered across the pages. The strength of the mind behind it had been evident; hell, even Spock had called it impressive, and that was high praise, indeed, from him. Jim had read it from top to bottom, and this from a man who'd seldom met a book for which he'd had the time during his Academy days, There was talent there, and a formidable one. If she'd had the temperament for it, the patience to deal with the laziness and ineptitude of students, she might've been an exceptional teacher.

 _She's still might,_ murmured the obdurate voice of hope. _She's thirty, not eighty, still plenty young enough to get off this ship and make her mark on the world. You've just got to set her as right as you can before you set her loose._

He put on her shoes. "And did you?" He held out his hands.

"Become a teacher?" She opened her footplates and set her feet on the floor. "I was about to when the whole business with the cryotube happened. Wanted to get my PhD in history and then get my teaching certificate. Then..." She stopped, and her gaze, which had been so bright, dimmed. "Well, the rest is history," she finished, and there was a terrible, sour irony to it that tightened his stomach.

 _Another glimpse of the wound,_ his father said somberly.

She came up with the first tug and settled her hands on his shoulders, and he rested one hand on her hip and splayed the other over the small of her back to prevent her from toppling backward and going ass over teakettle over the wheelchair. It was gentle and perversely intimate, a dance not yet begun. This close, he could smell the astringent infirmary soap Ogawa had used in her morning shower, and it was intrusive and perversely incongruous with the softness of her hand on his shoulder.

 _She should smell like jasmine and rose,_ he thought nonsensically, and blinked at the strangeness of it.

"Anyway," she said suddenly, "I did get my degree, at least."

"Let me guess: history," he ventured, relieved to be distracted from that odd, wistful thought.

She blinked in astonishment. "How'd you know?" She offered a puzzled smile. "Don't tell me you've got mind-reading equipment in here?" Her eyes surreptitiously scanned the room in search of nefarious, thought-snatching equipment tucked discreetly into a nearby cabinet.

He chuckled. "Just a guess from that test you took. There are a few majors with that level of thoroughness, and you don't strike me as the philosophy type."

"Actually, I do have a Philosophy minor," she admitted sheepishly. "And Religion. And Spanish. And German."

"My God," he sputtered. "How many lambskins did you want?"

"I liked learning," she said simply. "I liked knowing things. Besides, it's not like I had much else to do. I had some friends, but it's not like I was out partying. Most people don't want to bump and grind and get bombed with someone who came with their own nurse. Even if they did, it's not like the hot nightclubs were rolling out the accessibility ramps. So I took classes instead. Safer than trying to drive an electric wheelchair when you're bombed. And it might not've impressed the students, but it got the professors' attention, sure enough. Opened doors to a few internships and letters of recommendations. And it passed the time while everyone else was off screwing in Cabo."

"I'm going to ease you down and take another look at your feet," he warned.

She sank into the chair as neat as you please when his hands settled on her hips and guided them downwards, and she never made a peep as her legs shook with exhaustion tremors hard enough to rattle the footplates. She scooted back in the seat and thrust out her trembling feet and looked at anything but her unruly limbs.

 _It's all right,_ he wanted to tell her, but he only squatted and removed her shoes and braces. "You could still be a teacher," he said as he examined her feet. "There are plenty of fine programs. Starfleet might even have a place for you if you decide you can't live without replicator food."

"I'd have to find an accessible ship, wouldn't I?" she said with a wry grin. "And a school, for that matter. I don't think most places would take degrees two hundred years out of date. They're probably so much dust and faded ink by now. I wonder if my parents kept them after-" She lapsed into abrupt silence. "Don't see why they would," she said, and snorted.

 _We're dancing around the wound again,_ he realized uneasily. _And I'll be damned if I trust myself to handle it just yet._

"Trust me, Miss Walker; you could ace any admissions exam you set your mind to. There's plenty of correspondence courses you could take while you're here, and by the time you left, you'd have your pick of institutions willing to roll out accessibility ramps upholstered in red carpet to get you in the door."

She beamed. "Bless you, Dr. McCoy. I do believe that's one of the finest compliments I've been paid in a long time."

 _Well, I doubt your cryotube came equipped with an intercom system,_ he thought, but she was radiant, almost lovely in her pleasure, and so he said, "I know a good mind when I see one. As for the rest of you, the padding seems to have done the trick." He replaced the braces and shoes with brisk efficiency and sprang to his feet. "You need to check your feet every day. If you see any hot spots, you report them to me right away. Not three days later when you're bleeding through your socks. Understood?"

She nodded. "Yes, Doctor." Her expression was all solemn promise now, but the radiance remained, a shaft of sunlight piercing a leaden horizon, and in it, he could see the soul behind those tortured, misaligned angles.

 _I see you, Miss Walker._ Triumphant and not a little amazed at who he glimpsed behind the veil.

"All right," he said. "Now that we've got your body sorted out for the time being, how about we find something to occupy your mind so you'll quit wearing grooves in my damn floor?" He bent and scooped the new padd from the floor in question. "This is a padd, and with it, you can access practically the whole damn store of human knowledge. Now, to turn it on, you just..."

 

While his garrulous CMO instructed their taciturn, crooked foundling in the wonders of modern technology, Captain James T. Kirk sat in his ready room and wished like hell for an aspirin. He'd been reviewing incident reports and requisition requests for hours, and somewhere between a request for three cases of industrial lubricant from Scotty and one for a tube of lubricant of an entirely different sort from a young yeoman, his head had begun to throb with a dull, insistent pressure. His ass ached from sitting in the chair for so long; no doubt Bones would be howling about deadly clots come to lodge themselves in his lungs and give him a pulmonary embolism. He probably should get up for a stretch, but if he did, he wasn't sure he could convince himself to sit down again, and so he stretched his legs beneath the table in a half-hearted effort to appease his inner Bones and scrolled to the next request.

 _Great,_ his portable Bones grunted morosely. _If there was a clot in there, you've just set in loose in your circulatory system._

 _Have a little faith, Bones,_ he soothed. _Another half-hour, and I'll head over to the bridge for a while._

Bones was not to be mollified. _That's what you said an hour ago,_ he retorted irascibly.

_Besides, it's not like I've got anything to worry about. You've already raised me from the dead._

Bones made no reply, but he could sense him fuming, and in his mind's eye, he saw him scowling as he stumped about his meticulously-ordered sickbay and muttered under his breath about the tenacious luck of fools. The vision inspired a wave of affection, and he smiled around the top of his stylus as he scanned a request for Andorian rock candy from a nurse on Pennicott's shift. Another half-hour and he _would_ call it day and head to the bridge. With any luck, Bones would've torn himself away from his new patient, and they could discuss plans for the weekly officers' poker game and bullshit session. No Romulan ale this time(Nero's genocidal rampage had strained relations with the Federation to the breaking point, and there was heated talk of embargoes and economic sanctions from both sides), but Scotty always had something on hand, the canny old pirate, and Bones likely had a fifth or two of Kentucky bourbon stashed away. For medicinal purposes, of course.

But that was for later. Right now, he had to wade through this endless stream of reports, so he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and pretended to care about the endless parade of forms, names and scrawled signatures.

 _Pike left this part out when he gave you that sell job in that San Francisco dive,_ muttered a gritty, cynical voice inside his head, sandpaper and broken concrete against his nerves, and he winced and considered calling Bones down to give him that damn aspirin. 

There was a lot Pike never told him. He'd never gotten the chance, blown to hell by two rounds to the chest from a phaser rifle. The golden boy who'd saved Earth from destruction hadn't been fast enough to save the only guy who'd bothered to give him a second look and a chance to be something other than the screwup, malcontent son of a Starfleet hero, and he'd breathed his last on the floor of a ruined conference room while he was too busy trying to bring down a shuttlecraft with a firehose. He had gotten there too late, had realized what was happening only as Spock was pressing his fingertips to the captain's face and gazing into his fading eyes, and there had been no Bones with a cryotube then. Just scattered bodies and smoking wreckage and the hard floor beneath his knees and Spock's hand heavy on his shoulder.

Sometimes, he thought about asking Spock what he'd found as he'd rummaged through the contents of a dying man's head, what he'd felt as he'd sorted through thoughts and feelings never meant for his scrutiny, but he'd never quite dared. It had struck him as unseemly somehow, a gross breach of privacy against a man who'd shared very little of himself in life. They weren't his to see, those snatches of life snagged by Spock's grasping fingers. Spock could be forgiven his intrusion, excused by his lingering grief over the loss of his home world and the helpless desire to know if it was a trait shared by humans, but he knew better, and so he left the knowledge to Pike, God rest his soul, and to Spock, whose sense of propriety would never permit him to divulge the secrets he'd plucked from his head.

 _Get real,_ sneered the voice of his stepfather inside his head. _You've never asked because you're afraid of what you might find. You're afraid that the old man never thought of you at all in those last minutes, or that if he did, the last thought of you he had before the lights went out was disappointment. God knows he wouldn't be the first person you let down, would he? You've let your mother down more times than you can count. She's spent far too much of herself chasing after you and trying to get you to act like a civilized human being, too much of her energy apologizing and making excuses for your asshole behavior. How many times did she have to leave work to come down to the school for another rousing round of Your Son Is a Disciplinary Problem? Or drag your ass out of jail when you graduated to vandalism and public intoxication? I'm sure she was so proud to be dragging her teenage son out of the drunk tank in her work uniform, offering mortified smiles to the neighbors while you puked on her shoes._

_God knows you disappointed me._

_Well, lucky for both of us, I never gave a fuck about what you thought of me,_ he thought savagely, and scrolled to the next form in the queue. _You weren't my old man._

 _Let's talk about your old man, why don't we?_ his stepfather needled. _What do you think dear old sainted George would say if he could see you now? The only reason you didn't get bounced out of the Academy on your ass for that little stunt you pulled is because Nero interrupted your disciplinary hearing. A few minutes later, you'd've ended up slinking home with your tail between your legs and begging me for a job sweeping up the garage. Boy, I bet that would've made the old man proud, seeing his hotshot kid as a broom jockey for the guy who took over slipping it to his wife._

_Yeah, well, I didn't. I stopped Nero and saved Earth. And made Captain faster than anyone in Federation history._

_Only because your buddy, McCoy, felt sorry for your ass and sneaked you on board, and not before Vulcan got vaporized by that antimatter ray. And the only reason your cocky ass is in that seat now is because you let Pike die. You didn't earn that seat; you lucked into it, just like you've blundered into everything else. You coast by on your father's name and others' good graces, and you don 't care who you hurt while you're flying by the seat of your pants. You could've killed McCoy's career before it ever started, would have if it hadn't been Pike in the chair, and you let Spock's mother die and spat into his wounds to get your foot back in the door. You nearly destroyed the_ Enterprise _on her maiden voyage, and you can thank Scotty for saving you from that particular sin. Which you duly did by firing him when he had the stones to tell you to shove it up your ass. And hey, for an encore performance, you single-handedly pissed off the Klingon Empire by violating the Neutral Zone and killing a patrol crew. Thanks to you and your overzealous vengeance quest, the Federation might find itself ass-deep in a war it's not prepared to fight. So, yeah, you might've saved the planet like some big damn hero, but only until the Klingons get tired of paying lip service to diplomacy and blow some pisspot Federation outpost. Wonder how many bodybags your buddy Bones will be zipping up in sickbay once the shooting starts in earnest? And unlike you, they won't have the benefits of Khan's super-blood to bring them back._

 _And hey, what about San Francisco? There were only about twenty-five hundred casualties on the ground when the_ Vengeance _plowed headlong into downtown and demolished several city blocks and a huge chunk of the Academy before it righted itself. Just a little gift from its most celebrated cadet. But that's the way with you, isn't it? Once you've taken all you can from something, you don't give a flying fuck what happens to it afterwards._

The thought of San Francisco inspired a leaden nausea. It had taken nearly a year for the city to rebuild, and even now, there were still scars and subtle traces if you knew where to look--vacant lots where apartment buildings had once risen over the Bay or buildings whose purposes had shifted. The bakery where he'd once snagged the best sourdough he'd ever tasted was now an antique scrivener's store, with quills and inkpots and ballpoint pens displayed in the window, and though the bar where he'd raised so much hell was still there, its name had changed, and gaudy neon had given way to lush potted plants and tasteful plate-glass windows.

Starfleet Headquarters and the Academy had sustained heavy damage. The roofs of both had collapsed, along with the east wall. The student dormitories and classroom complex had been buried beneath tons of rubble, and the libraries and archives had burned. The med compound had lost power and been flooded by severed water lines, and rescue workers and recovery teams had spent days sifting through the rubble and bring out the dead and wounded and rounding up escaped animals from the biology labs. Bones had volunteered for a med rotation as soon as he'd patched up the surviving crew, and for nearly three weeks, he'd put in sixteen hour shifts at the makeshit infirmary and staggered back to his temporary quarters, covered in blood and swaying on his feet. He'd treated cadets and civilians alike, and God knew how many lives he'd saved with those miraculous hands, but he knew that he had because Bones was too proud to quit and too soft-hearted to give up.

He also knew how many he'd lost, because Bones told him. On the good nights, he'd shuffle in tired but satisfied, head held high as he shucked his filthy scrubs and tossed them into the recycler on the way to the shower, but on the bad nights, he'd stagger in, stooped and silent, and shuffle into the bedroom he shared with him and two others, where he'd plop onto his cot and bury his head in his hands.

"I lost one today," he'd croak to the floor between his feet, voice hoarse and raw from barking out orders and screaming for retractors and scalpels and hyposprays, and then he'd simply sit, head hung low and hands dangling between his green-scrubbed thighs.

Most of the time, he'd come out of it after a stiff drink and a few minutes to himself, would sigh and run his fingers through his hair and bend to unlace his dirty sneakers in preparation for his badly-needed shower, but there had been that awful night near the end of his rotation when he'd come in, dead-eyed and lurching like he'd started on the bourbon long before he made the door, and it had frightened him so badly that he'd frozen where he stood, ten years old again and watching his alcoholic stepfather reel through the living room with a bottle in one hand and a leather strap in the other. Then he'd blinked, and it was just Bones again.

He'd followed him into the room, past the two sheet-covered humps of their snoring roommates. Bones hadn't said a word as he'd plopped onto his cot like a man twice his age and simply sat, staring at the floor between his feet.

"I lost one today," he'd said hoarsely. Then, "She was thirteen years old. Thirteen."

"Bones-," he'd begun, but that was as far as he'd gotten, because Bones had spoken again. 

"She was playing with her little brother in front of building when the roof came down and buried 'em both," he'd said dully, and picked listlessly at the hair at the spar of his wrist. "The brother was six; he died instantly. Being crushed by a thousand pounds of concrete'll do that, I guess. The girl was luckier. She was pinned under a piece of rebar for two days." He'd snorted. "Luckier. Shit."

He'd tried again. "Bones-" But then Bones had looked at him, and his eyes had been so wet and raw with misery and lack of sleep that he'd flinched.

"I thought I had her," he'd gone on. "She had multiple crushing injuries and blunt force trauma, and she was dehydrated all to hell, but I got her stable. I did."

"I know you did," he'd said helplessly, because he'd known then what Bones was going to say. Hearing it was the last thing he'd wanted to do, but he'd also known that he had no choice. If he turned and walked away, Bones would hold it inside until it festered, until occasional sips from his favorite flask became constant pulls and those steady, miraculous hands developed a constant tremor that never quite stilled. He'd seen it before, heard it in the rattle of his stepfather's torque wrench against a freshly-scrubbed engine black as he'd swayed over a car inside his father's garage. So he'd stood there between his two snoring roommates and listened with a mounting ache in the center of his chest.

"I thought she was out of the woods. Dammit, Jim, she should've been." The plaintive, disbelieving cry of a soul demanding redress from a capricious god. "She was up and talking and eating. Hell, I even let her folks come in to sit with her. Her mother was sitting right there when she-" He'd stopped and dropped his gaze to the floor again, and he'd massaged his wrist as though it pained him. "When she had a goddamned pulmonary embolism. One minute, she's talking, and the next, every alarm on the damn bio bed is screaming."

"Clots are always a risk with crush injuries. Any first-year med student knows that." He'd rocked slowly to and fro, itching idly at his wrist. "I couldn't give her anti-coagulants right away on account of the internal bleeding and subsequent surgery, but I put her on them as soon as I could. When there was no abnormal bleeding seven days post-op, I took her off 'em, and for damn near two weeks, she was fine. No signs of clots."

"I opened her up, and there were just so many clots. Everywhere I looked, there was another damn clot. I'd bust one up, and there'd be another one a minute later. It was like she was hemorrhaging through her tissues, like she had Ebola or hemorrhagic fever or Tellarite compression syndrome. I tried, Jim. I tried so hard, but the more I worked, the worse it got. My hands just couldn't keep up." He'd been rocking vigorously by then, hunched and erratic and panting, and he'd known that he'd been back in that hotbox operating room, scalpel in hand and sweat in his eyes and trying to beat the devil.

"She died right there on the table." The rocking had slowed, and he'd buried his head in his hands. "I was wrist-deep in blood when she had a massive stroke. I tried everything--vasoconstrictors, transfusion--hell, I even tried old-fashioned cardiac massage, but-" He'd shrugged, a convulsive spasm of shoulder. "She was thirteen, Jim. Thirteen. She should be out with friends and getting the vapors over pimple-faced boys, not lyin' on a slab in Morgue Four. "Jesus Christ." He'd leaned forward on the cot, elbows propped on his thighs, and for one terrible moment, he'd thought he was going to be sick, but then he'd begun to cry, a harsh, ragged bark of anguish quickly muffled by the back on his hand. "Jesus Christ," he'd repeated weakly, and wrapped his arms around his middle as though to keep his insides in.

 _It's not your fault, Bones,_ he'd thought as he'd listened to him strangle on his muffled grief. _That girl didn't die because you weren't fast enough or good enough. She died because Pike was right. I was a cocky bastard who didn't listen. She died because I didn't listen to the voice in my head that insisted violating the Neutral Zone was a bad idea. She died because I wouldn't listen to Scotty when he refused to sign for those damn torpedoes. She died because I wasn't as smart or as good as I thought I was._

_She died because I didn't realign the warp core fast enough._

But he couldn't say any of that around the knot in his chest and the lump in his throat, and so he'd simply shuffled to the duffel at the end of Bones' cot and retrieved his hip flask from atop the jumble of clothes and assorted toiletries. He'd unscrewed the cap and taken a long swallow before he'd held it out to Bones, who'd taken it without a word and drained it one morose sip at a time. As for him, he'd squeezed his shoulder and retreated to his own cot, where he'd sat on the edge and watched Bones drink and pretended not to see the tear stains on his face, and when one of their roommates had rolled over and blearily suggested that they shut up and turn out the light and go the fuck to sleep, he'd fixed him with a glare so gelid that he'd promptly rolled over and retreated to the safety of his blanket.

No shower for Bones that night. He'd drunk the flask dry and blinked owlishly at the light with red-rimmed eyes, and then he'd turned it out and slept in his scrubs, the toes of his creased, dirty sneakers hanging off the end of his cot. He'd woken up the next morning with bloodshot, haunted eyes and a thunderous scowl, and though he'd reported for duty at the volunteer hospital with his customary professionalism, he'd hardly spoken for the rest of his rotation. Even grousing monosyllables had been beyond him, and Jim had known that his heart wasn't in it. It had flown away along with the little girl he couldn't save, and it hadn't come back until he was back aboard the _Enterprise_ and afforded the welcome distraction of treating cuts and bruises and the occasional case of lungworms.

He, too, had been haunted by the casualties, by the long list of names of those he couldn't save. When a young medical yeoman had brought him the list of the dead, he'd carried it to his desk, poured himself a jigger of scotch, and scrolled through it over and over, a penitent paying obeisance to those he had wronged. He'd read them until his eyes burned and blurred, convinced that if he only looked long enough, the damage would be undone and the person to whom it belonged would walk through the door and offer him a smile and a crisp salute. _There's been a mistake, sir. Dr. McCoy says I'm fit for duty. Ensign Jordan, reporting for duty._ After all, he was the cowboy, the child luck favored, and hadn't he once so proudly boasted that there were no unwinnable situations?

But there had been no mistakes, no jovial ensigns reporting for duty. The dead had remained dead no matter how many times he'd scrolled past their names or said them aloud like an invocation, and in the end, he'd had to pour himself another jigger of scotch and dictate forty-three letters of condolence to the families left behind when he hadn't been smart or fast enough to elude the pursuing hounds. There were form letters he could have sent, bloodless, pre-recorded communinques into which he could plugged their name and rank, but they had seemed a cold and cowardly tribute to those who had placed their lives in his hands, and so he had sat in his chair and recorded each in turn, had spoken their name and rank with reverence and thanked their families for their service and sacrifice. He'd recorded until he was hoarse and the scotch burned his throat like lye, and then he'd gone down to sickbay and slumped in a chair beside Bones' desk while he filled out autopsy reports and death certificates, and stared at the bodies zippered in plastic bags and draped in Federation flags. Thirteen bodies neatly arranged on silent biobeds. The rest had been lost to space, and as he'd blinked at the lucky few, he'd wondered what the other families would think when the shuttle brought home an empty casket. 

It was one of the many lessons Captain Pike never had the chance to teach him, and he often wondered what he would have thought, what he would have said in his place. Would he have dictated individual letters of condolence for each crew member, numbing the pain in his throat with swallows of scotch and uttering each name like an apology for his failure? Would he have gone down to sickbay to hold vigil over the bodies and get drunk under the watchful, sympathetic eye of the ship's doctor? Would he have escorted the flag-draped bodies to the transport shuttle and stood to attention while his eyes burned and shuttle crews carried the caskets inside with somber care and Bones surreptitiously waved a bioscanner over him and muttered about abnormal vitals and too much damn stress and not enough food or sleep.

 _And you think of your father,_ whispered the voice of his stepfather. _You wonder what he would think. He was a larger-than-life presence when you were a kid, a holographic picture projected on the living room wall about the com screen and rising from the corner of your mother's dresser drawer and your desk in your room. He was a legend. A goddamn saint. You must've heard the story of how he saved the_ U.S.S. Kelvin's _crew a thousand times by the time you were six, and for the longest time, until reality set in and you began your illustrious career as a world-class fuckup, you wanted to be just like him. Would he be proud of all the lives you saved by kicking that warp core back into realignment, or would he shake his head and damn you for the forty-three you didn't and blame you for the twenty-five hundred lives snuffed out when your ship plummeted from orbit and skimmed the skyline, a tectonic plate rearranging the world to its whims with no thought to who or what was in its path? Would he blame you for the old men, women, and children you flattened in their offices and apartments, for the babies never born because the maternity ward collapsed on top of laboring mothers trapped in the stirrups while nurses fled and dogged doctors shielded their patients with their bodies, or would he absolve you of all the guilt you've so rightfully earned and commend you for having the bald stones to go into a malfunctioning warp core with nothing but your courage and an unspoken prayer._

He was captain of a starship for fifteen minutes and saved eight hundred lives, including yours, _Pike told you once upon a time, and sometimes, when you're lying in bed and the ship is deep in the rhythms of Delta shift, you wonder who it was that wrote the condolence letter for him._

He sighed and tossed his padd onto the table. The pain in his head was now a constant, dull roar, and he closed his eyes and gently kneaded his temples with the points of his fingertips. 

_You call Bones down here, he's liable to think you're having a brain hemorrhage._

Nevertheless, he was reaching for the com, when Uhura's voice erupted from it. "Captain, I have an incoming call from Starfleet Medical."

"Starfleet Medical? Should I call Bones in on this?"

"I don't know, sir. It concerns the woman we found in the cryotube."

"I see. Thank you, Lieutenant. Put them through."

"Yes, sir," she said, and a moment later, the com screen filled with the image of a prim, slender woman with brown hair greying at the temples.

"Captain Kirk? I'm Dr. Moira Boswell."

"Dr. Boswell, what can I do for you?"

"According to a recent transmission from Commander Spock, you recently discovered a human woman floating in a cryotube."

He groaned inwardly and silently cursed Spock's fastidious nature. "Yes, we did."

"Have you identified her?"

"We have. Her name is Rosalie Walker, and according to my CMO and commander Spock's research, she's been in stasis for two hundred and forty years."

"Spock's report indicates that there were some medical abnormalities."

"There are, but none that pose any threat to the ship or its crew."

"We would like to determine that for ourselves."

"I trust Dr. McCoy's judgment implicity, Dr. Boswell."

"Given your track record, that's hardly a ringing endorsement," she retorted drily.

"We're not scheduled to return to Earth for a year."

"No, but you are scheduled to visit Starbase 4517 on your way to Ceti Alpha V, are you not?"

"Yes."

"Then she can report there for further examination and to determine the best course of treatment."

"Dr. McCoy has already prescribed a course of treatment."

"A second opinion never hurts. It should be a matter of routine. Unless, of course, you have reason to doubt his medical expertise.

He bristled. "I have every confidence in his abilities," he said coolly.

She offered him a vulpine smile that did not reach her eyes. "Good," she said. "Then we have nothing to worry about. See you soon, Captain." Almost jaunty now, and the vulpine grin stretched even wider. Then she vanished as she terminated the connection. 

"Hell," he sighed, and pressed the button on the com. "Kirk to McCoy. Please report to my ready room. And bring an aspirin."

There was no reply from Bones, but he stalked in a few minutes later, kit in hand.

"I only asked for an aspirin, Bones," he said as Bones set his kit on the table and opened it to produce not just the desired aspirin, but a bioscanner.

"Yeah, well, if you're asking for an aspirin, your head must be about to fall off," he grunted, and jabbed the bioscanner at his temple. "Only you could get yourself worked up over a little peace and quiet."

"I am not worked up," he protested. Then, quietly, "I've just been thinking, that's all."

McCoy's expression softened. "You've been doing that a lot lately." He peered at the readout from his bioscanner.

"Hazard of all this peace and quiet," he said drily. "'M I going to live?"

"Just a headache," he admitted grudgingly, and dropped the aspirin into his palm.

"Don't sound so disappointed, Bones," he teased. "I'm sure I'll fulfill your dire predictions sooner or later."

"Don't even joke like that, Jim," he chided. "You've already died on me once. I'm not sure you'll get that lucky the second time around."

"C'mon, Bones, that wasn't luck. That was the skill of your legendary hands."

"The hell it wasn't. If Khan's blood hadn't had magical healing properties, you'd be six feet under the sod," he snapped.

He decided to change the subject before he was treated to another lecture on his idiot recklessness. "I just got a call from a Doctor Boswell at Starfleet Medical about our hitchhiker."

Bones froze, hand hovering over the lid of his kit. "What did they want?"

"They want her to report for an examination when we get to the starbase."

Bones plopped into an empty chair. "Examination, my ass. They want to take her."

"So what if they do? They're trained doctors, too, you know."

"That may be, but they don't know how to handle her."

"Handle her? What, is she psychotic?"

"No! She's just...scared, Jim. Everything and everyone she's ever known is gone, and she's just trying to figure things out."

"I can't blame her there," he said, and thought of the years before Pike had goaded him into Starfleet with the challenge to meet or better his father's achievement, when he wandered from place to place and odd job to odd job in search of a place to call his own.

"She's not doing too badly, all things considered. She's diligent in her therapy and quiet as a mouse. Doesn't fuss or bother anybody. I wish she'd talk more, but I'll be the first to admit that doctors and nurses aren't the best conversationalists."

"Oh, I don't know, Bones. We've had some amazing conversations."

The corner of his mouth twitched. "My point is, she's making progress, coming out of her shell. I got her a padd this morning, and she's happier than a pig in slop. I'm liable to go back down to sickbay and find her eyeballs fused to the screen." He sounded perversely approving, almost hopeful. Then he grew serious again. "She's adjusting, Jim. If we move her now, she might retreat right back into shell and not come out."

"They have trained psychologists on hand."

"They don't have the time I do. They take her, and she'll get one hour twice a week sandwiched in between rehab sessions with ten different PTs."

"And?" he said, nonplussed.

"And I don't want to put her through that if I don't have to," he snapped, and the vehemence of it startled him. "She needs time and patience, and I can do that for her. I might not be able to get her out of that damn chair, but I can ease her pain, make her comfortable, leave her a little better off than when I found her. She deserves to have at least one doctor do that for her."

"Why are you so invested in this?"

Bones didn't answer right away. He simply sat, legs stretched in front of him and fingers interlaced across his chest. "She doesn't talk much, but when she does..." He trailed off and studied the toes of his black work boots. "She's told me a little bit about the way medicine used to be, what they used to do to her before the world got some damn sense. I try not to think on it too much because it makes me sick. There's no excuse for some of the things they did," he said, and though his voice was quiet, Kirk could hear the anger in it, dark and seething and bitter as blood. 

"When I was a kid, my dad used to go out to the other farms to treat animals that had gotten down," he murmured suddenly, and slowly rotated his feet at the ankles.

He said nothing, confused by the abrupt non sequitur. He simply rested the point of his chin on the backs of his fingers and listened.

"Most times, he could do for them. A little salve, a good sheep-dip, maybe a simple wash and a walk around the paddock. But sometimes he couldn't. Sometimes it only took one look to know there was nothing to be done, you know?"

He didn't, but he nodded all the same, fascinated by this rare glimpse into his friend's head.

"And when that happened, well..." He shrugged, but did not elaborate. Instead, he said, "You'd be surprised to see how stupid people can be, how cat-shit mean. Most of them were just dumb as hell as opposed to malicious, but if you handle a thing too rough, it'll break no matter what your intentions." Bones looked at him then, his eyes dark with truths and memories only he could see. "That woman's been handled far too rough, Jim, and it's left a mess. I don't know if these hands have the skill to clean it up, but I do know they won't hurt her, won't leave more bruises than she's already got."

And there it was, the heart he tried so hard to hide behind layers of irascible sarcasm and cantankerous reserve. It was the same heart with which he'd been presented on the transport shuttle along with a grumbled surname and a hip flask of bourbon. The same one he'd seen when Bones had come back for him at the dry-dock and dragged him onto the _Enterprise_ against his better judgment, blustering his way past a timid security officer and sneaking him into sickbay at the risk of his fledgling Starfleet career, the only career left to his divorce-ravaged bones. The same one he'd worn on his sleeve when he'd sat on his cot in his filthy scrubs and wept for a thirteen-year-old girl he couldn't save.

 _You've found yourself another stray, haven't you, Bones?_ he thought fondly, and his fingers burned with the memory of a hip flask pressed into his palm.

"I'll do what I can, but I don't have much sway with Starfleet Medical. If this comes down to a pissing contest, I'm not sure what good I'll do."

"You might not have the biggest pecker in the pissing match, but by God, you've got the widest spray," Bones muttered drily.

"Thank you, I think."

"Welcome. Don't get too used to it. Your head's swollen enough as it is."

"Bones, you wound me. I am but a humble young captain."

Bones rolled his eyes. "Humble, my ass," he said, but his eyes twinkled with amusement.

Kirk rose from his chair and rounded his desk to sling an arm around his shoulders. "Ah, c'mon, Bones, you know you love me."

Bones huffed in exasperation and muttered under his breath about insufferable egomaniacs, but he didn't deny it, nor did he resist when he steered him towards the door.  
"Where are we going?" he demanded and lunged at the table as they passed to snag his medkit.

"To the bridge, of course. I am the captain, after all."

Bones snorted. "Really? I hadn't noticed." But there was a spring in his step as they left the ready room, and by the time they stepped into the turbolift, he was humming.

Kirk shook his head, but he listened to the tuneless warble with clandestine pleasure as the turbolift ascended to the bridge. _I might be a failure and a fuckup and a corn-fed fool,_ he thought as Bones bounced and rocked on the balls of his feet. _But at least I was smart enough to accept that flask._

Bones paused in his absent crooning. "What?" he demanded irritably.

James Kirk could only smile.


	7. First Flight of the Sparrow

McCoy circled the wheelchair for the third time, pausing now and then to crouch and fiddle with the various accoutrements and accessories. The replicator had spat it out half an hour ago, and he'd been here ever since, double-checking measurements and testing the brakes, handrims, and anti-tip bars. Everything appeared to be in working order, but he wouldn't know for sure until he got Rosalie into it and had her take it for a spin. It was designed specifically for her, after all, and she would know if it worked or if it didn't. 

_You did a fine job of it, son, if you ask me,_ his father said, staring out at the Decatur dusk from his favorite front-porch rocker, booted feet propped on the railing and gaze fixed on the meandering flight of the lightning bugs as they hovered lazily above the lush, green grass.

_Yeah, well, it's not your ass that's going to have to sit in it every day. Or mine. It's Rosalie's, and she's a bitty thing. I don't want her getting pressure sores._

He prodded the gel-cell cushion he'd chosen with a skeptical finger. It had seemed perfect when he'd read its specifications in the medical supply catalogue to which he was religiously subscribed, but the longer he looked at it, the more uncertain he became. The gel was suitably pliable beneath his fingertips and distributed the pressure as it should, but the material was rough against his skin and didn't feel particularly breathable. In the controlled environment of the _Enterprise_ , that wasn't a problem, but she wouldn't be on the _Enterprise_ forever. When her contract was up, she'd be free to go wherever she pleased, and if she ended up in the dry, parching heat of Vegas or the humid, smothering heat of Georgia in the blazing heart of summer, her skin would need the ability to breathe and sweat. Not only that, but the material needed to be able to absorb sweat and wick it away from her skin without harboring bacteria. Sweat in the crack of your ass was miserable when you could walk it off and air it out and wash it off whenever you pleased. When you couldn't, well, it was its own kind of insufferable hell. And wet skin led to sores and fungal infections, and if neglected or left untreated, the former could cause sepsis, necrosis, MRSA, and other potentially-fatal systemic infections. Damned if he'd leave her open to all of that because he'd picked the wrong cushion.

 _I think you're being a bit too hard on yourself, son,_ his father noted mildly, rough fingers interlaced across the soft flannel of his shirt. _You're a damn fine doctor, and plenty smart enough to know what she needs._

Maybe so, but he certainly didn't feel smart as he squatted in front of the cushion and gave it a firm squeeze. He was well-versed in bones and muscles and nerves, in the texture of flesh beneath his probing hands. He knew the balance of a laser scalpel or a cauterizer, the heft of a tricorder. Hell, he could often read a bioscanner by the pitch of its chirp. These things were part and parcel of his experience as a doctor, part of the backdrop to his daily life.

But wheelchairs and their intricacies were another matter. He'd seen them, of course, had felt their handles beneath his hands as he'd pushed laboring women to the maternity ward and ordered them to breathe, dammit, breathe, and for God's sake, don't push until you get to the delivery room, and skirted effortlessly around them with a twitch and swivel of his hip as he ran to the trauma bay with his scanner clamped between his teeth. But they'd been as ubiquitous as the sickbowls and packets of cotton batting that stocked the supply room, and just as inconsequential. They were just there, to be used when needed and then discarded. One size fits all, just like the scrubs and booties in the prep room of the OR. He'd never spared them more than a passing glance, and he'd certainly never had to design one from the ground up for someone who would have to rely on it for the rest of their lives.

And therein lay the crux of his anxiety. This wasn't a temporary stint; this was permanent. With good habits, luck, and proper care, Rosalie might easily live another fifty years. Fifty years of transfers and brake sets and popping wheelies with a flick of her wrists. Fifty years of swinging out the flootplates and trusting the armrests to be solid beneath her hands as she adjusted her position. Fifty years of rolling up under tables and pivoting on the fly to avoid kids with more energy than sense or restraint. Fifty years of rolling over grass and asphalt and up inclines and down hills. Fifty years of asking carbon fiber to do what her body never could, and if he got it wrong, she'd be the one to pay for it.

 _You're putting an awful lot on yourself, Len,_ his father said.

 _Yeah, well, she's got enough to carry,_ he answered, and ran the tip of his finger over the front caster to check for cracks and minute imperfections that could cause a catastrophic failure down the road and send her ass over teakettle to a date with a maxiliofacial surgeon and a cosmetic dentist.

 _It's not like you can't make adjustments or order a new one,_ his father said prosaically, and idly scratched the knee of his jeans as he watched the sky turn to rose and gold and the shadows lengthen across the grass.

 _That could take time,_ he pointed out, and gently rolled the chair back and forth. _There's no guarantee the replicator won't get backed up again with orders for clothes or coffee mugs or one of Chekov's chess boards. And with Dr. Boswell in the picture, I'm not sure I've got that kind of time._

Dr. Moira Boswell. The thought of her soured the bile in his belly and brought the strong, sickly-sweet taste of his morning coffee to the back of his throat as he rose from his crouch and skirted to the back of the chair to grasp the push handles. He'd wasted no time looking up her credentials after the Friday night poker game in Jim's quarters, and what he'd found had made his heart drop into his shoes and his head regret the amount of bourbon he'd consumed the night before. He'd squinted at the screen of his padd with a cup of scorched coffee in hand and the gritty, greenbark bitterness of dry-swallowed aspirin on his tongue, and with every word he'd read through his Saturday-morning hangover haze, his dread had sharpened, an ulcer eating into the lining of his stomach. When he'd finished, he'd pushed away his half-drunk coffee and scoured his teeth with his tongue to rid them of the taste and the sweet glaze of melted sugar, and then he'd reached into his desk drawer for the bottle of bourbon. There'd been little more than a splash of amber liquid in the bottom, but it had been enough. He'd unscrewed the cap and considered pouring the contents into his cooling coffee, but then he'd simply lifted the bottle to his lips and finished it in two long swallows. He'd promptly chased that with his coffee, and then he'd turned off his padd with a jab of his finger and gone into the tiny bathroom to brush his teeth and splash water on his face.

A scrubbed face and clean teeth later, and he'd gone to sickbay, where he'd given himself a hangover cure and watched Rosalie potter aimlessly along the rows of empty biobeds or bury her nose in her padd. He'd hoped she'd talk to him, pepper with questions about his experiments or the ship or the universe outside the ship, but she'd been raised a lady, taught to keep her curiosity and her questions to herself, and she'd only offered him a wave and a soft, "Good morning, Doctor McCoy," and gone back to the twelve-inch world of her padd, head bent to the screen as she followed it down whatever path she'd chosen for the day. He'd glowered morosely at her bowed head until he'd been sure she wasn't going to talk, and then he'd occupied himself with reviewing his notes on his study of Khan's super-blood and its effects on damaged braincells until lunch time, when Nurse Ogawa had delivered a plate of alleged meatloaf to Rosalie's tray and he'd abandoned his fruitless study and returned to his quarters to continue his research into his esteemed colleague.

Vanderbilt class of '48. Two years in private practice in Dallas, Texas, and ten years climbing the ranks of Starfleet Medical. Her first hitch was as a JMO on the _U.S.S. Excelsior._ After that, she settled into a three-year stint as the base doctor on Riegel IV. Now, she was an eminent orthopedist at Starfleet Medical, with a host of commendations and journal articles to her credit. She and another doctor, an Andorian neurologist named Doctor Feleq, had spent the past two years researching organic bioprostheses and the use of nanotechnology in surgical procedures. Everything he found pointed to a brilliant, capable doctor who could provide considerable insight into Rosalie's condition and suggest treatment options that had never crossed his mind. He should be thrilled, relieved that more experienced eyes were on the case. Rosalie could only benefit.

 _But you're not,_ his father said. _You've always been a good judge of character, and something about her rubs you the wrong way, sets your teeth on edge. It's the eyes, maybe. You watched a couple of guest lectures she delivered to the medical cadets at the Academy, and there was nothing behind her eyes, no hint of warmth or compassion. They were dark and cold and strangely predatory, the calculating, reptilian gaze of a gator lurking in the mudflats. Looking at them made your skin prickle._

_Maybe you're being unfair. Maybe you're just pissed that such a golden opportunity is being pulled out from under you by a Starfleet bureaucrat with her eyes on another laurel for her extensive portfolio of articles and papers and professional plaudits that you can only envy, and disappointed that you won't be the one to see Rosalie through and send her out into the world with a handshake and a godspeed. It's only human to sulk a bit when someone comes along and upsets your applecart just because they can, and as much as you'd like to be above petty smarting, you're as human as the rest of us. Maybe the only thing wrong with Dr. Moira Boswell is your unbecoming case of chapped ass._

_But you don't think so. It took you a while to figure it out, a while of stewing and sulking and skulking back to sickbay to perform a half-assed inventory of the gauze and bandage supplies to get your mind off your impending screwing at the hands of Starfleet Medical. You were wrist-deep in a stack of bedsheets when you realized why she bothered you so much, and the connection so appalled you that you had to grip the edge of the shelf to keep yourself from falling on your ass. An image arose in your mind of that godawful, grainy footage from the archives, of that boy screaming in that stander box while doctors and nurses watched his misery in dispassionate silence and droned at him to just relax and stand up, as though his tears and his terror and the agony of his spastic muscles were just a decision easily made and easily amended. White shoes and white scrubs and eyes lifeless as weathered statuary._

_Her eyes were like theirs, cold and assessing and utterly devoid of mercy. You knew without a doubt that she spared neither a thought nor a prayer for the lives entrusted to her care. Not for the mice and Tribbles and piglets she vivisected in the course of her med-school days or in her subsequent research, and not for the patients she treated as a board-certified surgeon. To her, they were equally irrelevant, nothing but problems to be solved and conditions to be conquered by the might of her medical knowledge. If she looked at Rosalie, she wouldn't see a woman doing her best with what she had and trying to keep her head up no matter how high the water got. She'd see only the spastic muscles and misaligned bones and the fingers that fumble with anything finer than a brick. She'd break her just for the chance to put her together again and parade the results in front of her peers at medical conferences all over the galaxy, and she wouldn't care how much it hurt or how deep the misery ran for Rosalie. After all, she's just so many diagnoses in the depths of her padd._

_The thought of turning Rosalie over to her made you light-headed, so you stood there with your head rested on your outstretched arm and looked at her from under it. She was lost in her padd, pale fingers splayed on either side of the casing, but after a minute, she looked up, brow furrowed._

You all right, Doctor McCoy? _she asked and lowered her padd to her lap, and the concern in her voice made your heart ache because it was genuine, born of simple sweetness._

_You couldn't tell her what was rolling around in your head, couldn't tell her that she was probably going to doctors whose hands would be indifferent to the hurt they caused, and who wouldn't give a damn about homesickness or straws that jabbed the roof of her mouth or bowls of blackberry cobbler or grits with sausage drippings and cheese and sawmill gravy. So you just nodded and grunted irascibly at her and went back to the safety of your inventory, and soon, she went back to the more civil company of her padd._

She was in therapy now, pinned beneath the marginally more benign hands of Stuart and Connor and still unaware of the changes in store for her should Boswell have her way. He'd have to tell her, and soon, but she'd been so cheerful this morning that he hadn't the heart to ruin it, not when she'd actually hummed while Nurse Ogawa combed her hair and mustered a tentative smile for Stuart. Besides, her stress levels were still alarmingly high despite these welcome signs of improvement, and he hadn't wanted to send her into a cataclysmic tailspin from which she might not recover. So he'd left her to march between her green-scrubbed wardens and come to set up her new chair.

_And you didn't want to be the heartless son of a bitch who won her trust and then sold her down the river to a doctor from her childhood nightmares._

_It's not my fault,_ he protested peevishly as he pushed the wheelchair in a slow, winding circuit around the room. _My Starfleet career isn't but two years old, and thanks to that little stunt with Jim, I don't have the clout or the unimpeachable record to challenge a veteran with a proven track record. Starfleet doesn't give a rat's ass about your bedside manner or your popularity with your patients; it only gives a damn about results. She's got the credentials. All I've got is a whole lot of wish and an obnoxious gunslinger for a captain. If push comes to shove, I'm going to lose._

 _No, it ain't your fault,_ his father agreed, and rested his hand on his arm. _But you feel like it is, which is why you're in here obsessing over the proper material for cushion covers._

He put the chair through its paces, turning it in elaborate figure-eights and tight circles around the replicator to test the bearings, bolts, and turning radius. Wheelies and impact tests and stability tests and tests to ensure that the armrests were firmly connected to the frame yet easy to remove. He tested the adjustable axle and removable wheels and the switch to control the anti-tip tubes. He fastened and unfastened the lap belt and removable shoulder harness. Maybe he couldn't save her from the grasp of ambitious doctors or the clinical hands of strangers and a treatment plan that made few allowances for fear and loneliness and simple human frailty, but he could do this for her. He could at least send her away with a comfortable, functional place to sit her ass.

And Christ, what a miserable parting gift that was after he had made her so many promises, but it was all he had left. Once he was certain the chair wouldn't fall apart at the first jolt, he returned it to the center of the room and set about installing the positional aids. Neither of them were strictly necessary, truth be told, but he wanted to see if they made a difference in her posture or comfort level. He picked up the padded bilateral side supports and his screwdriver and carefully installed them, screwing them into place with persnickety care. If they worked, they'd give her more trunk support and encourage her to sit up straight rather than list heavily to the right or slouch and compress her diaphragm. If they didn't, then he was out nothing but time and he could try something else.

 _Provided she doesn't become Boswell's newest lab rat,_ he thought glumly, and eyed the placement of the supports. They might need adjustment now that he looked at them.

 _Why don't you let her sit in it first?_ his father suggested mildly, and his chest cramped with longing. Six years gone, and he still missed him, still woke in the middle of the night to the memory of his voice.

He sighed and stretched and reached down to knead a knot of tension from the small of his back. This was as good as it was going to get until he could see her in it. He slipped the screwdriver into the pouch he wore at his hip to store bioscanners and hypos, and then he bent and released the brakes. Rosalie should be finished with her therapy session by now, and if he were lucky, getting to test out her new chair would distract her from the rankling indignity of being stretched like saltwater taffy.

There was no sign of her when he entered sickbay a few minutes later. He was so accustomed to seeing her golden head bent to her padd or gazing out the observation window that its absence surprised him. He slowed, hands on the push handles of her chair, and blinked at the unexpected emptiness.

 _Maybe the therapy session ran long._

"Where's Miss Walker?' he asked a passing yeoman pushing a cart full of fresh linens.

She stopped and stood to abrupt attention. "I think she's in the shower, sir," she answered nervously, and her hand twitched with the urge to salute.

"At ease, yeoman," he said kindly. "I just wanted to be sure nothing happened while I was gone."

"Oh, no, sir," she assured him. "She came out just like she always does."

"That's good," he said. "You can get on back to your work now."

"Yes, sir." She flashed him a rabbity smile and scuttled past him to begin the task of changing the linens.

She'd just finished the second bed and was moving to the third when Rosalie returned from the showers with damp hair and skin that smelled of hospital soap. She'd traded her usual green scrubs for a set of pink ones, and he was pleased to see that she was wearing her AFOs.

Nurse Ogawa trailed in after her. "Hello, Doctor," she said. "Rosalie wanted to change it up a little today."

"I see that." There was absolutely no difference between the pink scrubs and the green, but he could hardly blame her for wanting to liven up her drab surroundings with a splash of color.

"Afternoon, Dr. McCoy," Rosalie said cheerfully, and the blue of her eyes stood in startling contrast to the pink of her scrubs.

"Well, aren't you chipper today?" he remarked, pleased at her buoyancy.

She blushed. "Today's just...a good day," she said, and shrugged.

"I'm glad to hear it," he said, and he meant it. She'd been somber and pained for far too long, and it was good to see color in her cheeks and light in her eyes.

 _Enjoy it while you can,_ muttered a cynical, taunting voice inside his head. _That light'll gutter once she figures out you're passing her on. Hell, it might be what puts it out for good._

He suppressed a grimace at the thought. "I got you your chair here," he said doggedly, and pushed it forward a few inches.

Her eyes widened. "This is mine?" she asked softly, and reached out as though to touch it, but her fingers hovered uncertainly over the armrest.

"Who else would it be for? I told you I was working on it."

"I know, but it's-" She studied it intently, gaze wandering over the footplates and sleek carbon-fiber chassis. They lingered on the translucent spokes and simple silver lap belt and shoulder harness. Her hand still hovered in the air, fingers outstretched as though to caress a lover's face.

"It's yours, is what it is, and you might as well touch it because your backside'll be settled in it soon enough," he said gruffly, startled by her reaction. He'd hoped she'd like it, of course, had wanted to make a chair that was pleasing as well as comfortable and useful, but he'd never expected this. She was reverent, almost awestruck as her fingertips skimmed the armrests and trailed down the curve of the swing-away footrests. 

She swallowed with an audible click. "It's beautiful," she breathed, as though it were priceless treasure and not a piece of medical equipment.

"It's just a damn wheelchair," he muttered diffidently, and fought the ridiculous urge to sidle from foot to foot.

"No." She laughed softly. "It isn't." When she looked at him, her eyes were wet.

"Well, it won't matter how nice it looks if it doesn't work the way it should, so let's get you out of that crate and see what we've got." Churlish and too sharp, but her display of emotion discomfited him.

"All right," she agreed placidly, and sat up. She sniffled and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

 _For God's sake, why are you crying?_ he thought, bewildered and flat-footed, but he only shooed her toward her bed and followed her with the new wheelchair. 

She maneuvered the bulky hospital chair parallel to the bed with the skill of long practice, set the brakes, and opened the footplates. He aligned the footplates of the two chairs opposite one another, and she held out her arms. He deftly rounded the chair and stepped between them, and when her hands were set firmly on his shoulders, he curled his around the spars of her hips and lifted her to her feet. It was elegant, graceful, and it was a measure of her confidence in him that she didn't tense when he swung her around in a precise one eighty and lowered her into the seat.

"That was smooth as cream," he said as her hands slipped from his shoulders and came to rest on the armrests. "That means the therapy's working."

"Well, I should hope so. I'd hate to think I was giving Stuart and Connor a bird's-eye view of my taint for nothing," she replied primly, and smoothed the knees of her scrubs as though they were a flowing skirt. 

He guffawed helplessly at the incongruity of it, and she flashed that radiant smile again, eyes dancing with mischievous amusement. "I don't need to hear about your...let's just-," he grunted, and turned his head to forestall another honk of laughter.

She giggled and brushed stray wisps of hair from her forehead. "What do you want me to do first?"

"Just tell me how it feels, first of all," he said when he was certain he wasn't going to laugh like an idiot.

She dropped her hands to the wheels and gave them a tentative push. "Well, it's an awful nice glide," she said approvingly.

"We'll get to that in a minute. Right now, I'm more interested in how the seat and back feel. Do they have good support? Are they too hard? I don't want you getting pressure sores."

She wiggled from side to side and pressed her buttocks more firmly into the cushion. "Gel-cell?"

"Mmm."

She bounced. "What's the seal on them like these days? Used to be, if the seam failed, the gel spooged out onto the backs of my knees. Made it look like I was performing unseemly acts with the shaving cream."

 _Lord help me,_ he thought, and resolutely ignored the image of a naked Rosalie getting up to indecent business with the Barbasol. "I wouldn't recommend that. It burns like hell," he said matter-of-factly.

She gaped at him. "Do I want to know how you know that?" She hooted with laughter.

"Doctor-patient confidentiality," was his only reply, and she threw her head back and cackled, fingers tenting spasmodically over the edges of the armrests as her arms tried to draw up to her chest despite the Loxtan in her system. His lips twitched in happy sympathy. "Now that I've dispensed my wisdom, I need to know about the seat. You say the seam fails?"

She sobered with an effort. "Well, they used to. Usually, because I got it wet."

"Why was it wet?"

The last of her amusement faded. "Accidents happen," she said delicately, and developed an acute interest in her knees.

He folded his arms. "You had bladder control issues?"

"No."

"Bowel?"

"No," she snapped. "No." She studied her knees, and a muscle in her jaw twitched. "My plumbing works just fine, d-darn it all. It's the doors that don't work. Or the hallways. Or the nurses who think my need to go to the damn toilet should come after that text to their boyfriend on the importance scale. I'm remarkably fine, all things considered, Doctor. It's the world that's out of whack." She snorted, and the tears in her eyes now had nothing to do with wonder or gratitude.

 _Just another look at the wound,_ he thought, and wished he could offer her some consolation for the hurts that festered and shifted beneath her skin like shrapnel.

 _No, not like shrapnel,_ he amended. _Like masonry dust. Like clots._ He thought of a thirteen-year-old girl laid open beneath his scalpel while his overheating cauterizer fought a losing battle against the countless clots that choked her bloodstream and filled the operating room with the acrid stink of ozone.

He shook his head to clear it and opened his mouth to speak, but Rosalie wasn't finished. "And then there's-" She hesitated and shifted in the chair, and color crept into her cheeks. She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. "Oh, hell, you're a doctor, and I'm a grown woman," she declared.

"I am," he agreed. "And you are."

She met his gaze. "Then there's my cycle." She was scarlet to the roots of her hair, but she didn't break eye contact. "Sometimes, it leaks. I need an absorbent material that's easy to wash or replace. Fleece is nice, but I don't need to tell you what happens to it when it meets Mother Nature. I'm not sure which is worse, the stink or the stain." She shifted again. "Sorry, Doctor. I don't expect you needed to hear that part. Sometimes my brain-to-mouth filter is on a time-delay."

"Sweetheart, I'm a doctor. I've heard just about everything. So what did you use back then?"

"A cover supplied by the seat manufacturer. It was some black, cotton-polyester blend. My mama or the nurse just threw it in the wash when it got dirty."

"Black in Georgia?"

"I know! I've burned my behind more than once. It hides stains better, though, and if I had to choose between a scalded backside and everyone at the dining hall seeing my embarrassing mishaps, well, you'll have to forgive me my sad vanity."

 _There's nothing sad about wanting a little dignity._ He thought of a small, airless room that smelled of piss and festering rot. _Please, son. Please._ "I can get you something in black," he said.

"Don't trouble yourself about it. It's not an emergency."

"What about the fabric? It's not sticking or rubbing on you?"

"Not so far." She ran the tips of her fingers along the underside of her leg.

He made a mental note to get her up in an hour and check for abrasions or hot spots. "Why don't you take her for a spin, get a feel for how it handles?"

The ebullient grin resurfaced. "I thought you'd never ask." She released the brakes and set her hands on the handrims.

"Put on your lap belt before you go tearing around my sickbay in that thing."

"I didn't have a lap belt in the old one," she pointed out.

"Well, you've got one now. Use it," he countered implacably.

"Yes, Doctor." She reached for the buckle. "What are these?" She nudged the shoulder harness with her shoulder.

"It's a positioning harness. I thought it might help you sit straighter. And these positioning boards should give you trunk stability."

"Huh. Never tried those. My parents thought it was too much coddling and would just make me more dependent."

"There's always a risk, I suppose," he conceded as he reached for the buckle of the shoulder harness. "Maybe if they left you to sag in your chair by yourself for hours on end. Ideally, this should just provide some incentive for you not to slouch or lean quite so much. When you feel resistance, it's time to straighten up." He snapped the buckles into place.

"Will it hurt?"

"Your muscles might fuss at you a bit while they get used to things, but you shouldn't hurt, no." He slipped his finger between her shoulder and the strap to make sure it wasn't too snug. "If you do, just release the snap and tell somebody. I might have to do a little more adjustment or impromptu fleece surgery." He clapped her on the shoulder. "That feel all right?"

She wiggled inside the harness. "I guess. It's not pinching or rubbing."

"Then, Miss Walker, you are officially cleared for takeoff." He stepped back with a grandiloquent sweep of his arm.

She was gone with a laugh and a snap of her arms, and her turned to follow her progress as she glided down the corridor. Smooth as glass, and soundless save for the whetstone hiss of her palms on the handrims. Straight and steady, with no signs of strain on her joints. He followed behind her at a distance, watching the straight, regal line of her body and scanning the wheels for signs of wobble or warping.

 _You look like a lady now, Miss Walker,_ he thought proudly as she reached the end of the corridor and spun with fluid ease.

 _She's always been a lady, son,_ his mother corrected him gently. _She just needed a little help showing it._

"How's it feel?" he asked, but he could see the answer in her face, in the unabashed joy he saw there as she threw back her head and shot forward with another snap of her wrists, eyes closed and chin tilted into the breeze generated by her motion. She was free, a child speeding down the hill on her ten-speed, hands held high and feet flying from the pedals. She was flying as high as her broken wings would allow. It made his chest hurt to look at her, and so he turned his head and studied the closed shutter of the observation window until the tightness in his throat subsided.

A sussurating hiss of palms on rubber. "You did this?" she said from the vicinity of his navel, and when he turned his head, she was in front of him, hands folded in her lap.

"Did what? I picked it up from the replicator, if that's what you mean."

A soft huff of laughter. "No, I mean, you made this, designed it?"

He nodded. "I studied a couple of catalogues and manuals, put together something I thought you could use. We can still make adjustments if something doesn't work."

She smiled, and tears glistened on the ends of her lashes.

"Well, hell, if it's that bad," he said, alarmed by the sudden waterworks.

"No, no," she said hastily, and flapped her hands at him. "No." She blinked to clear her eyes. "It's not bad, Dr. McCoy," she assured him, and snorted.

He stared at her in helpless, floundering bewilderment, and then she held out her hand. He extended his hand in reflexive turn and was startled by the dry, cool softness of her hand in his as she shook it.

"Thank you," she murmured. Her lips pursed as though to say something else, but then she simply shook her head and gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

 _It's just a wheelchair,_ he thought as she released his hand and spun to take another circuit, but as he watched her spin and pirouette effortlessly through the simple obstacle course presented by the room, he knew that wasn't true. To him, it was just a chair, brought forth by a few days' study of bioscanner readings, measurements, test results, analysis of her initial therapy sessions, and the medical equipment catalogues he'd pulled up on his padd early in the morning over cups of coffee and just before bed after shift. It was the least demanded of him by the tenets of his profession, but to her, it was something else entirely, something he couldn't quite grasp as he stood there on his two healthy legs and watched her run with every turn of her wheels.

He watched as she slalomed nimbly between Nurse Ogawa and the bed-making yeoman. The battered, bedraggled bird that had clung to him in the hydrotherapy pool was finding her wings and stretching them toward the healing warmth of the sun. She couldn't soar yet, but she wanted to. He could see it in her face as she grinned at a befuddled orderly stacking sickbowls and bedpans in a supply cabinet. What was more, she had the courage to try. All she needed was time and space and a gentle nudge when she threatened to falter. An easy touch, his father would have called it, and in his mind's eye, he saw his father coaxing a colicky mare around the paddock, whispering encouragement soft and low into her flicking ears and occasionally tugging on the lead or tapping her flanks when she threatened to founder.

 _I can get you there, sweetheart, I know I can,_ he thought as she rolled into another turn.

 _All you have to do is keep her the hell away from Starfleet Medical,_ his dolorous harbinger of woe reminded him.

Unaware of the shadows gathering around her, Rosalie twirled and rolled and sang. It wasn't a song he recognized, and it was off-pitch and warbling, tin plates in a dishwasher, but it was also inexpressibly happy. 

_Wonder if she'd be so happy if she knew where she was going,_ needled his conscience, and he turned abruptly on his heel and took refuge behind his desk, where his fingers prickled with the memory of that gentle squeeze.


	8. White Knights in Cotton Armor

Something was off. Not wrong, precisely; Dr. McCoy still came into sickbay promptly at eight o'clock every morning and left sometime after eight at night, when wiry, genteel Dr. Pennicott came in with his soft London accent and tweedy conviviality. The breakfast glop came every morning at seven, delivered by Nurse Ogawa with a smile and a faint whiff of talcum powder. Frick and Frack, better known as Yeomans Connor and Stuart, put in their appearance at nine, and from nine until ten-thirty, she floundered and flopped on a vinyl therapy mat while sweat beaded in her armpits and in the crack of her ass and she prayed that the Tijuana brass section that occasionally took up residence in her gut wouldn't put in an untimely appearance the next time they rolled her legs above her head. 

Everything was as it should be, and yet, it wasn't. There was a tension in the air that hadn't been there before. Dr. McCoy, who had heretofore been possessed of a crotchety, gruff affability, was now taciturn and morose, even downright waspish. He scarcely spoke to her these days, and though his daily tests of her range of motion were still thorough and gentle, he no longer engaged in idle conversation, no longer prodded at the ragged edges of her mind with curious fingers. He no longer looked at her with those penetrating brown eyes or offered her a fleeting curl of lip before he sprang to his feet, clapped her on the shoulder, and returned to his desk to bury his nose in his padd or arrange the contents of his myriad tube racks. Nor did he grunt at her not to burn her damn eyes out on the padd screen even as his stylus scrolled to the next page on his own. Now he just tugged on her limbs, gaze fixed on her wrists and ankles, and trudged back to his desk to record the results. No pat on the back or words of encouragement. Just the shuffle of feet and the squeal of his stool wheels, and he left her to the one-sided company of her padd.

_I'm just another monkey in a cage,_ she thought sadly as he stalked past her bed without so much as a glance and sat down at his desk.

"Good morning, Dr. McCoy," she said hopefully.

His only response was an incomprehensible grunt. His head was already bent to his padd.

_Are you mad at me?_ she wanted to ask, but she was too old to be asking such childish questions, and so she ignored the sting of his indifference and fussed with her covers, smoothed a wrinkle in the cotton and pinched it into a lopsided ridge again.

_Not to mention too needy,_ her brother said. _But then, you always have been. You've always had to be the center of attention, always assumed everything was about you. You were always clinging and crying and showing off. Mama and Daddy couldn't go five minutes without you needing something or wanting something, couldn't have ten minutes to themselves because you might need them. And God forbid someone else needed them. Then the whole damn world liked to come to an end because it didn't revolve around precious little Rosalie._

_Two hundred years, and you haven't changed a bit,_ he said bitterly. _It's still all about you. For Christ's sake, he's a doctor on a goddamn spaceship. He was a doctor before the universe dumped you into his lap, and he'll be one long after she's shut of you. And in case you haven't noticed, he hasn't exactly been hovering at your bedside with a cloth to soothe your aching brow. Half the time, he isn't even here. He comes in in the morning, stays until after your session, and takes off for parts unknown until dinner. A few more hours of puttering in his workstation back there and sucking coffee, and then he's off until morning. Just because he's the center of your suffocating little world, that doesn't make you more than a fart in a high wind in his._

_Who knows where he goes when he's not ankle-deep in your bullshit? Maybe he's doing rounds in ancillary clinics on other decks, or maybe he just goes home for a nap and a handjob from some perky little nurse. God knows there's enough of them giving him the doe eyes. The only one who doesn't is Ogawa. Hell, maybe he's got a wife and kids or a girlfriend, someone to keep his bed warm and his balls high and tight. Maybe he's catching hell at home or his wife cut him off until he calls the mother-in-law. Maybe one of his rugrats is squirting shit from both ends._

She considered that as she picked up her glass of morning orange juice and took a sip. He'd never mentioned a wife or children, but then, why would he? It wasn't her business, and anyway, doctors weren't in the habit of discussing their private lives with their patients. Patients were problems to be solved, and they were treated as such and left behind at the end of the day along with the discarded booties and latex gloves and dirty scrubs mounded in the biohazard bins. They most certainly weren't confessors to be taken into confidence. 

_I don't see a wedding ring,_ she noted as her gaze dropped to his hands. His long fingers were bare as they curled around the edges of his padd, and she saw no tan line on the third finger of his left hand.

_Maybe they do things differently nowadays,_ her grandmother mused. _Traditions have a habit of changing. Maybe they wear necklaces instead or get tattoos. Could be they don't do anything at all anymore. Getting married was dying out by the time you were coming up. Lord knows what's happened to it now. Maybe the idea of taking vows before God died with the first mushroom cloud. I reckon putting trust in the Almighty doesn't hold much appeal once you've seen your neighbor's skin boil off from radiation sickness. Maybe folks just join bodies and call it good. Babies come with or without the paperwork._

_Even if he isn't married, odds are good he's got someone waiting at home,_ her brother opined. _Guys like that don't go too long without getting their dipstick wet._

An image arose her mind of Dr. McCoy undulating beneath the bedsheets, thin cotton covers pooled at the base of his spine as his ass rose and fell in a sinuous, copulatory rhythm. Elbows propped on the mattress and head bent to the flesh of an unseen throat as the bedsprings creaked in strident accompaniment to his hips and the headboard knocked against the wall.

_Dear God, what is_ wrong _with me?_ she thought, mortified, and tried to quell her burning shame with a gulp of orange juice.

Unfortunately for her, her throat seized, and she coughed and wheezed and spluttered a spray of orange juice down the front of her scrubs.

Dr. McCoy looked up from his padd, brows drawn together in a thunderous scowl and lips pursed in preparation to deliver a stinging rebuke, but then he dropped his padd with a clatter and shot to his feet. "Breathe," he ordered as she coughed and heaved. The glass of juice listed dangerously in her grip, and he snatched it from her and set in on the tray table. "Breathe, I said." His hand braced her spasming back as he reached for his trusty bioscanner.

"Sorry," she croaked as the orange juice burned in her nostrils and dribbled down her chin.

"What the hell happened?" he demanded.

_Oh, nothing. I was just imagining you in bed,_ she thought wildly, but discretion told her such honesty would hardly lead to the reestablishment of cordial relations, and so she settled for the more diplomatic truth of, "It went down the wrong pipe, that's all," and dissolved into another coughing fit.

"Those sheets were fresh," he grumbled, hand firm and steadying on her hunched back. "Do you need a sick bowl?"

She shook her head.

"Nurse Ogawa," he barked. "Bring a fresh scrub top for Miss Walker."

"Yes, Doctor," came the faint reply from the interior of the linen closet.

He scowled down at her while he waited for Nurse Ogawa to arrive, and she wanted to curl in on herself and hide. There was no good humor in his face, no lively curiosity in his eyes or gentleness in his touch. There was only The Doctor, stern and impatient and faintly disapproving as he took in her wet, juice-sticky smock and the juice in the ends of her hair.

_I didn't do it on purpose!_ she wanted to shout. _Jesus Christ, what crawled up your ass and died?_

_Probably the same thing that crawled into your panties,_ Daniel jeered. _Well, you ain't got nothing to worry about there, little sister. That man isn't going to waste one look on you, let alone a second. You don't drink swill when you have your pick of chardonnay. The only thing you were ever good for was easy pickings for drunk frat boys who wanted to know if your pussy was as tight as the rest of you, and not a one of them called you the morning after._

_Daniel!_ her grandmother exclaimed, scandalized. _That is enough!_

It might've been enough, but it was also true. She'd never had a serious relationship, had never gone courting, as the old folks put it. While her cousins had giggled over makeup parties in their bedrooms and gone on first dates to the movies, she'd stayed home and read her mother's stash of bodice rippers and wondered what it would be like to see a man "inflamed with insatiable passion" or dance in the moonlight with a diadem in her hair. While they were courting in the mall and learning about love in the backseat of their parents' SUVs, she'd sat on the porch of her Grandmama's house and listened to her reminisce about the good old days, when she and Granddaddy had been young and they'd found love by the porch light and gone dancing on the promenade to Abba and John Fogelberg and Leo Sayer, and on prom night, when all her cousins had gone to the dance, long and lovely and escorted by dapper young princes, she'd gone to the country club with grandmama and eaten shrimp and grits and tried not to wish she was somewhere else, with a corsage on her wrist and a young man's cologne on her skin.

_Don't you worry about it darlin'_ Grandmama had said, and patted her hand, because Grandmama knew everything. _You're as pretty as a picture, and your day will come. You'll have a grand romance one day, you'll see._ She'd patted her bony hand and smiled her most reassuring smile, and then Rosalie had dropped a spoonful of grits onto the white linen table cloth with a jerk of her palsied, stupid hand and tried not to cry as she stared at the mess and the white-jacketed waiter pretended not see it.

The grand romance her fairy grandmother promised had never materialized. She'd lost her virginity to a frat boy with beer and Jaeger on his breath on a bed that smelled of dust and unwashed gym socks. The only parts of her he'd touched had been her breasts and her too-dry cunt, and there had been no tenderness in it, no storybook passion. He'd fucked like he partied, hard and indiscriminately, and it had hurt when he'd pushed into her, a garden hoe plunged into arid soil. She'd cried while he'd worked, back of her hand crammed into her mouth to stifle the sounds, and prayed it would be over quickly. She couldn't remember his name now, and his face was an indistinct blur on the periphery of her vision, but she could remember the yeasty, sour reek of his breath against her cheek with perfect clarity, and the poster hung above his bed. Kurt Cobain, as she recalled, gazing down at her bobbing breasts with his mournful blue eyes as her paramour pounded into her, oblivious to her marked lack of enthusiasm and the convulsive juddering of her legs as her innocence was pulled up by the bloody roots.

_That was fuckin',_ was all her wasted Romeo had slurred when it was over, and then he'd rolled over and staggered over the carpet of dirty clothes that littered the floor and left her in the cooling mess to go to the bathroom. He'd never come back, and she'd limped home with her business full of blood. The PA had nearly shit a brick when she'd rolled in with her legs splayed awkwardly in the wheelchair and her thighs smeared with blood, but she'd cleaned her up without complaint and settled her into bed, and from then until she left to get married a year later, she'd called her Carrie White.

It hadn't gotten much better after that. There had been a few good decent men, a handful who could at least remember her name for the night, and who had bothered to make sure she was ready before they went merrily to town between her spraddled legs. One had even been so chivalrous as to help her back into her chair afterward, seizing her by her spindly elbows and powerlifting her into her seat like a concrete pylon, but most had seen her only as an available hole and a story to tell on the golf course or the barstool in some rosy, distant future of law firms and tasteful wives installed in opulent two-stories with lush, green lawns. There had been no wine and roses, no midnight strolls under the stars, and there were certainly no rings or bittersweet memories of the one who got away.

_Yeah, well, there isn't going to be any of that here, either. Even if McCoy didn't give a rat's ass about my bony knees and floppy legs with all the tone of a noodle and the curvaceousness of a ruler, he wouldn't be interested. Doctors don't shit where they eat. They don't fuck what they fix, either. So I can wish all I want, but it's just going to be another childish daydream._

She tried to ignore the heat of his palm as it splayed between her shoulder blades and swallowed the renewed impulse to ask him if he were mad at her, a child begging pardon for some unknown sin. Her legs twitched with the need to draw up to her chest, and she was miserably relieved when Nurse Ogawa appeared with a scrub top and a fresh set of sheets.

"All right, Miss Walker," she said with brisk cheer. "Let's get you squared away here." She held out her hands, and Rosalie curled her fingers around her slender forearms and scissored her legs until one foot fell off the bed. She huffed and sat up, and then dragged her other foot off the bed. "Well, it wasn't pretty, but it was effective. Good job," she said, and though Rosalie knew it was well meant, the effusiveness grated.

"Thank you, ma'am," she said, and brushed her hair out of her face. She waited for Dr. McCoy's more forthright assessment of her dry-land frog paddle, but none came. He was already back at his desk, nose buried in his padd. She surveyed him in bewildered consternation, and the nettling sting of rejection deepened.

She clutched the edge of the bed while Nurse Ogawa arranged her chair in preparation for her imminent transfer, and when she turned and held out her arms, she gripped her wrists and slid off. The nurse was smaller than Dr. McCoy, and far less solid, and they swayed precariously for a moment until she found her center of gravity. Then it was an awkward, shuffling box-step to the chair.

"Stop dragging your feet, Miss Walker," he grunted from his desk. "You know better."

_That doesn't mean I can do better right now,_ she thought peevishly, but she bit her lip and doggedly lifted her feet a fraction higher.

"Good job," Ogawa encouraged mechanically. From McCoy, there was only bilious silence.

_To hell with you, then,_ she seethed, and collapsed into her chair, and screw what he thought of her form.

She followed Ogawa into the bathroom, legs throbbing with exertion. It was small, polished steel and antiseptic, and even her sleek, new chair crowded the toilet when she pulled inside. Ogawa stood on tiptoe beside the sink, shanks wedged against the smooth, round basin to let her pass. Rosalie pulled as close to the opposite wall as she could and set her brakes, and then she raised her arms above her head without being prompted.

Ogawa pulled off the soiled top and hung it over the handrail beside the toilet, and then she handed her a damp rag. "To clean yourself up there," she explained, and gestured at her neck and chest.

"Thank you," she said tonelessly, and took the proffered cloth. She blotted at her neck and chin to rid it of the orange juice's sweet stickiness, and then she went to work on her chest and the underwire of her bra. "Don't think this is going to get it out of my hair," she said, and scrubbed at the fabric beneath her breasts.

Ogawa plucked the cloth from her and began to pat it in the ends of her hair. "Probably not," she conceded. "But that's what showers are for. I'm sure it'll all come out after your session."

_I'm thirty, not three, and I'm not soft in the head._ But she was too tired to squabble with the vanguard of the Florence Nightingale Auxiliary in a claustrophobic bathroom with orange juice drying on her tits, and so she bit her tongue against a sharp retort and simply said, "Yes, ma'am." Her grandmother always said politeness was a lady's most reliable defense.

She handed Ogawa the rag in exchange for the fresh scrub top and slipped it over her head.

"There now," Ogawa said with that infuriating brightness. "That's much better."

"It certainly is," she agreed, and grit her teeth against the urge to add, "You ridiculous fool." Instead, she willed her slumping shoulders back and released her brakes. "Well, best get to it, shouldn't I? Soonest begun, soonest done."

"That's the spirit," Ogawa answered, a cheerleader in full throat, and Rosalie was tempted to suggest she replicate herself a pair of pom poms. But she wasn't so far gone in her pique at the doctor's inexplicable pissiness to descend into rudeness, and so she offered a brief smile and backed out the door.

"Thank you," she said when she'd cleared the door. To Dr. McCoy, she said, "You have a good day now, Doctor."

There was no response from either of them. Nurse Ogawa simply offered a faint twitch of lip and swept around her and down the corridor between the beds, and the doctor simply scrolled to the next page on his padd. The former's indifference bothered her not at all. To her, she was just another body to be moved and an ass to be washed, just another shift's dirty, unglamorous work. But the latter's continued lack of give a damn infuriated her. More than that, it _hurt._ Until this sudden, mystifying silence, she'd thought him different from the myriad doctors who'd come before and seen her as nothing but a complaint to be silenced and an account to be charged. She'd believed him when he'd said he cared.

_Especially after the wheelchair,_ Grandmother Lavinia said. _You couldn't believe it when he came wheeling that honey down the way. The sickbay model with which you'd been making do was nice enough, but that one...well, it was beautiful. There was no other word for it. It was compact and sleek and clean, and you knew even before you got into it that it would be perfectly balanced and light as a feather. It wasn't some half-assed catalogue job with a handful of "custom" parts hastily tacked on; it wasn't an amalgamation of that'll do and good enough. It was yours from caster to push handle, built from the ground up with you in mind._

_One look, and you knew there was only one mind that could've come up with it, could've known your frailties so intimately. It hadn't come from some self-styled accessibility consultant or some bureaucratic bean counter at the insurance company who decided your fate not based on your needs but on the depth of your daddy's pockets. Nor had it come from some one-size-fits-all warehouse where they churned out glorified wheelbarrows and charged you an arm and a leg and most of your dignity to look like a Panzer on a budget, clunky and boxy and feminine as a footlocker. It had come from the doctor. He might not have assembled it with his allen wrenches and his screwdriver, but he'd made it all the same. He had held your lopsided, bony body in his hands and learned its imperfections and recorded them on his padd, and then he had taken that knowledge so meticulously gathered and turned it into that chair._

_It hurt your chest to look at it because you could see everything that had gone into it--the thought, the attention to even the smallest detail, the care. The simple human by-God decency of it. Lord knows how long it must've taken him to get it right, how many hours he must've spent going over the measurements and calculations and combing through journals and catalogues to find just the right part for what you needed. Hours? Days? Maybe even weeks. He told you when you first met that he did nothing half-assed, and damned if that chair didn't prove his point._

_It felt even better than it looked. It cradled your behind and supported your back, and for the first time in your life, you felt straight, as though everything were where it ought to be. No slumped shoulders or buckled hips or knees knocking and rubbing together. No backache as you struggled to keep from listing to the left. No sore neck from trying to push a chair too heavy for your atrophied muscles. It was just...right. Just so._

_And Lord how it handled. Like riding on the wind. Going up and down that aisle with nary a hitch, you could almost believe there was a place for you in the world. It was so free and easy, and you wondered if that was how other people felt when they passed you on their two good legs and smiled just because, if they felt like flying without wings, arms outstretched and heart following their dreams somewhere beyond the clouds. You spun, too, spun and slalomed, and as the chair obeyed your slightest touch with fluid grace, quicksilver cupped in the palm of your hand, you thought that this must be what dancing felt like, and in your mind's eye, you saw yourself spinning across the polished parquet of a ballroom bathed in the glow of crystal chandeliers, a debutante come to the ball at last. You've been given a lot of things in your life--toys, books, trips to Europe and Lake Tahoe with your family--but that chair was your first true gift, rare as a Faberge Egg and just as priceless._

_You couldn't tell the doctor that, not without sounding like a fool and crying all over yourself like a hormonal schoolgirl, so you tucked it close to your swollen heart like a cherished keepsake and settled for a handshake and a hoarse "Thank you," and then you spun away before you started bawling and ran as far as your wheels could roll, ran until the grey sickbay walls became a magnolia-lined drive that wound on forever, over red clay and sweet hay and bluegrass lush as Eden. You rolled until the muscles in your arms burned, and only the threat of being too sore to move in the morning made you stop._

_And the doctor? He was pleased as punch, or you thought he was as he watched you wear a fresh set of grooves into his floor. He followed you for the first few laps up and down the aisle, arms folded across his chest and steps unhurried as you darted ahead of him like a hummingbird rushing headlong toward the sun. He was pretty as a peacock in his blue tunic, and by the gleam in his eye as he watched you reap the fruits of his painstaking labor, his feathers were in full, preening flourish. Which is why his sudden studied indifference hurts so much. You can't shake the feeling you've disappointed him, insulted his kindness and a gift so generously given._

_She has that effect on people._ Daniel said gleefully. _She disappointed Mama and Daddy so badly that they had her put in storage. Hell, for all the good it did, they could've put her in regular storage next to the old box springs and the old canning equipment. She could've gathered dust all the same, and think of the money they would've saved._

_Daniel Walker, that is enough,_ Grandmama Lavinia cried, her defender to the last, and Rosalie would have given every minute of her resurrected life just to bury her face in the crook of her neck and smell her perfume.

"Screw you," she croaked around the hard, hot knot of grief in the center of her chest.

McCoy's head snapped up. "What?"

_I wasn't talking to you,_ she thought. "I'm sorry," she said. "I haven't got the foggiest idea what I did to put starch in your britches, but I never meant you any insult, Doctor. If it was my waterworks over the chair, it won't happen again. If I'm not working hard enough, then I'll work harder."

He stared at her in mute stupefaction, stylus hovering dumbly over his padd. "What on earth-" he began, but before he could finish, Yeomen Connor and Stuart arrived in their green scrubs and crepe-soled shoes.

"Morning, Doctor," they said, oblivious to his thunderstruck expression. "Morning, Rosalie. You ready to get started?"

_No._ She waited, sure that the doctor was going to speak, but he merely dropped his gaze to his padd again.

She cursed the Brothers Imbecile for their timing, spun on her proverbial heel, and marched into the therapy room.

"I have a feeling we're in for a good session today," Stuart predicted, and bounced on his toes. "All right, let's get you on the mat."

Down she went, from a princess on her crystal throne to a beggar grubbing in the dirt, fingers clawed and sticky on the vinyl mat and lips kissing the memory of other people's asses and feet. She was acutely aware of the orange juice in her hair, the sweet, sickly-sour tang of old vomit.

_Stop touching me,_ she wanted to shout, but the PTs were already lost to their routine, stretching and arranging her to their liking. She was nothing to them now, a doll in the hands of obstreperous children. Her muscles locked, legs rigid and arms pulling toward her chest, hands curled into bloodless, cadaverous fists. _Stop, stop, stop._ But they did not stop, driven by the goal set before them by Dr. McCoy's carefully-laid treatment plan. They merely redoubled their efforts, massaging and exhorting and admonishing her to relax.

"Stop," she whispered, but they did not hear. They simply plucked at her limbs with greater determination.

"Rosalie, c'mon, you gotta do your part if you wanna get better," Connor urged.

_It's CP, not a slipped disk, you simpleton,_ she thought viciously as the young woman pulled her arm away from her chest. _I'm never going to get better. All I can do is not get any worse._

"Stop," she repeated.

"No can do, Rosalie," Stuart said with condescending, effervescent familiarity, a personal trainer goading their intransigent client to the next exercise. "Let's work." He gripped her thigh and made to slide her leg over.

_That was fuckin',_ slurred her first frat-house Romeo, and Kurt Cobain gazed down at her from above a rattling headboard.

_She disappointed Mama and Daddy so much that they had her canned. Should've just put her in regular storage beside the old box springs and Mama's old canning equipment. She would've gathered dust all the same, and think of the money they would've saved._

"Stop!" she howled, and jerked her leg from Stuart's presumptuous grasp. "Stop touching me, dammit!"

The doors to the therapy room opened to reveal Dr. McCoy. "What the hell is going on in here?" he demanded, and fixed them all with a baleful glower.

"Dr. McCoy," Stuart began, but Rosalie cut him off.

"I can't," she said thickly. "I know you're already mad at me, but I can't do this right now."

He surveyed her in stony silence. "Out," he snapped, and she thought he meant her, but Stuart and Connor scrambled to their feet. They sidled from foot to foot in awkward indecision, and Stuart opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it upon careful consideration of the doctor's expression.

"Yes, sir," he said meekly, and fled, a bewildered Connor in tow.

McCoy strode toward her as she lay on the mat, eyes blazing inside his face. "Now, Miss Walker, you tell me why you're kicking up such a fuss in my therapy room." He bent and reached for her shoulder.

She flinched, heart pounding and adrenaline sour in her mouth.

He froze, hand hovering over her hunched shoulder. "Hey." Soft and low, and he dropped into a crouch beside her head. "Easy. I'm not going to-" He dropped his hand between his knees.

"I know," she answered quietly, but her legs tried to curl into her belly, and she couldn't stay the helpless tremors that shook her from head to toe.

"Then why are you shaking?" A shadow above her head as he waved the bioscanner over her.

"Adrenaline."

"I can see that, but why?"

She shrugged. "Sometimes when people are angry with me, they're rougher than they mean to be."

"What in the hell makes you think I'm mad at you?" he demanded indignantly. That earned him a huff of wry amusement, and he hung his head and ran his fingers through his hair. "Well, I'm not mad at you," he said gruffly. "I'm just worried. The way you were carrying on, I thought you were being assaulted."

"That explains this morning. What about the last three days?" A hand snaked out to trace idle lines on the toe of his boot.

"The last three-?" He sighed. "Ah, hell." He reached between his knees and picked up her scrawling hand. "I'm not mad at you, Miss Walker." He gently rotated her wrist. "Squeeze my hand. I got a call from Starfleet Medical," he said quietly. "They want to see you on our next trip to Starbase 4517 next week."

"Is that bad?" Unease drew a cool finger down her spine, and her body, which had begun to relax, tensed again.

"They just want to get a look at you. Dr. Boswell is an expert in the field of orthopedics and bioprosthetic medicine. She might be able to offer insights and treatment options I didn't think of." He lowered her hand.

_That doesn't answer my question._ "Then why do you look like somebody up and died?"

He shifted, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. "They might want to keep you on."

Keep her on. Like she was the hired help, scuttling through the back corridors and lugging slop buckets. "What if I don't want to stay on?" she replied hotly. "We had an agreement."

He shifted again, rocked back on his heels. "Ordinarily, that would be enough, but since you're not a member of a recognized alien species or a Federation citizen, they can refuse to recognize it."

"A recognized alien species?" she repeated scornfully. "I'm a god-I'm a human being for God's sake!" She slapped the mat in impotent frustration. "Jesus fucking Christ, I'm so damn tired of having to prove it."

His hand hovered over her shoulder again. "I know. It's a mess of bureaucratic bullshit and semantics."

_The hell you know,_ she snarled inside her head. "Those semantics have teeth."

"I know." He sidled down her body until he reached her socked feet, and then he picked one up and began to chafe it between his cradling hands.

"Can you refuse?"

"To hand you over?" The ball of his thumb kneaded the scrawny, archless sole of her foot just behind the big toe. "I could bluster a bit, but it wouldn't do much good. My career's not but two years old, and Boswell outranks me as both a doctor and a member of Starfleet. It wouldn't take her long to go over my head. A day, maybe two." Warm palms pressed gently against the sides of her feet, and the pads of his fingers massaged her from heel to toe.

"So since Starfleet considers me a piece of space junk, they can do whatever they want with me?" she said bitterly.

"I'm sorry," he answered, and his fingertips rose to skim her bony ankle.

_Fat lot of good that does me,_ she thought petulantly, and closed her eyes against the scald of tears.

_Don't be hard with him, Rosalie, darlin',_ her grandmother counseled. _It's a bitter pill, but it's not his doing, and I don't know too many doctors who'd be down here on their knees, giving you a foot massage after you spilled orange juice on their bed and caterwauled at their PTs. He's doing the best he knows how, same as you, and it's not fair to expect a doctor who's known you for a week to risk his professional neck. It'd be nice, but it's not the way this old world works, not even in the twenty-third century._

_If nothing else, try to remember all the kindnesses he did for you, how he stayed with you all that first night and made sure you had a clean sick bowl. How he gave you fair warning before he started pushing and pulling on you, and how he gave you a choice for the first time in your life. How he fed you grits and blackberry cobbler, and if you ever start to forget those things or start to think they don't matter, then I want you to remember the chair your little behind is riding on and give that man the respect he deserves._

She raised her head from the mat and peered at him as he knelt over her toes like an attentive vassal. His hands were thorough and unhurried as they worked her sensitive, easily-bruised flesh. He was so very careful, gaze intent as he studied the effects of his work on her spindly limbs. 

_He calls himself a doctor, but he's not,_ she thought as he rubbed her fleshless calves. _He's a healer. Doctors hand off all the dirty work to someone else and take all the credit when it works and chalk it up to an act of God when it doesn't. He's knee-deep in the stink and the shit, and I think he'd drown himself in it if it meant he could keep me out of it._

_And they're going to take you out of his hands,_ said a dismal voice inside her head, and she let her head drop to the mat and loosed a strangled bleat.

"Oh, now there's no need for that," he said, and it was so pained and plaintive that she snorted in spite of her misery. Her foot was lowered to the mat, and she heard the asthmatic, sticky wheeze of knees over vinyl. A moment later, he appeared in her blurry vision.

"Yes, there is. I don't want to go."

He gripped her shoulders and eased her to a sitting position. "It's a starbase, not Siberia." He slipped an arm around her to hold her up. "For what little it's worth, I'm not keen on the idea, either."

_It's worth more than a little,_ she thought, and rested her head on his shoulder. 

His boots squeaked on the vinyl. "Now, come on. I'm not going make you work with the PTs today, but you are going to work." He slipped his free hand beneath her knees, and when she wrapped her arms around his neck, he rose and carried her to her chair. "How about something without hands?" He set her down with persnickety care and waited until she was properly seated, and then he turned and snatched a handcycle from the nearby equipment table. "Come on," he ordered, and jerked his head in the direction of the main room.

She followed him through the doors and was relieved to see no sign of Connor or Stuart. Now that the moment had passed, she was ashamed of her outburst. Still, apologies were in order the next time she saw them.

_If you see them again,_ her brother reminded her.

Dr. McCoy set the handcycle on the floor in front of his desk. "Put your feet on the pedals."

She rolled up behind it, set her brakes, released her footplates, and jabbed her toes at the waiting pedals. The right foot settled into place easily, but the left wavered and floundered drunkenly until the doctor guided it home.

"I want you to pedal. It'd be nice if you could get them all the way around, but I'll settle for an honest effort. Your flexibility's improved, but your stamina and muscle strength are still poor," he said prosaically.

"Go on and say it, Doctor. They're string beans with feet."

An abbreviated grunt. "Well, get those string beans cooking," he commanded. "We'll try for one minute."

"Before we start, I'm sorry you had to hear my foul mouth."

"Cussing is like gas, Miss Walker. Everyone's got to let it out sometimes."

She sputtered in watery amusement. "Bless you, Doctor."

"Now pedal."

She hesitated. "Whatever happens, Dr. McCoy, I want to thank you. I've never been treated so kindly or with so much patience. Thank you for taking the time. And for the chair. I've never had one finer."

"Welcome," he replied diffidently, and crossed his arms. "And it's just a wheelchair."

"And I told you, no, it isn't," she answered, and with that, she began to pedal, head bowed and shoulders bent to the harness.

 

Not ten hours later, he was running down the corridor between his quarters and sickbay in his sweatpants and undershirt, socked feet slapping the floor. He'd been roused from his woefully inadequate sleep by the com and the panicky voice of the night nurse on the other end, and he blinked grit and the sudden brightness of the deck from his eyes. As he neared the door, there came a shrill wail and the resounding, musical crash of tumbling bedpans.

"Ah, hell," he swore, and swung into sickbay.

He was greeted by the sight of Dr. Pennicott advancing on a hysterical Rosalie with a hypospray and a pinched, grim expression, a soldier wading into battle against a fearsome dragon. And Rosalie was fearsome as she thrashed in the grip of four orderlies with a strength that surprised him. She was crying as she bowed off the bed and kicked wildly at Dr. Pennicott's stomach. Her face was flushed and wet with tears, and her upper lip was thick with snot. An orderly tried to force her arm to the bed, and she screamed, pain and terror and blind panic.

"Everyone stop!" he bellowed. 

All motion ceased. The orderlies clutched Rosalie's twitching limbs, and Dr. Pennicott froze, hypospray poised above her bunching thigh. He fixed him with a befuddled expression.

"Dr. MCCoy," she clearly needs to be sedated," he said incredulously, and gestured to Rosalie, who sobbed in her human bonds, chest heaving.

"Put that down," he barked, and stalked to the bed. "Now."

"But-" Dr. Pennicott protested doggedly.

McCoy rounded on him. "The last time anyone put her to sleep, she woke up and it was two hundred and forty years later," he hissed. "Now put it down."

Dr. Pennicott lowered the hypospray.

He elbowed past the orderly charged with restraining her arm. "What the hell happened?"

"We don't know." Dr. Pennicott. "One minute she was out like a light, the next she was screaming to wake the dead and crying."

She was still crying, hard, wrenching sobs pulled from the pit of her stomach, and she struggled feebly in the grasp of the orderlies.

"Let go, dammit," he snapped. The flesh beneath their hands was already reddening dangerously with the promise of bruises. Four sets of feet immediately took a step back, and he scowled at the livid finger marks on her skin. "Tomorrow morning, you will all report to sickbay for a refresher course on how to handle combative patients."

"Yes, sir," they chorused.

"Dismissed," he said curtly, and they beat a hasty retreat. Dr. Pennicott hovered uncertainly over his shoulder.

"Give me a minute? I know that this is your rodeo, but..."

"Nonsense, Doctor," he replied. "You are the CMO." He rose on his toes and then rocked back on his heels. "Should you need me, I'll be doing a scrub count."

"Thanks."

Dr. Pennicott hesitated for a moment, arms swinging idly in front of him, and then he nodded, clucked his tongue against his cheek, and drifted toward the surgical prep room. When he was gone, McCoy grabbed the privacy curtain between the biobeds and pulled it closed. 

"Miss Walker, it's Dr. McCoy," he said, and reached for her shoulder. He was rewarded with a yelp, and she tried to tuck her arm beneath her body. "Damn." He grabbed his scanner and swept it over the limb. 

_Damn orderly sprained her arm. Probably when she was trying to twist away from him._ He put down the bioscanner and picked up a hypo of local anesthetic. "I need you to hold still," he told her. "This will kill the pain until I can fix it." When she recoiled from the advancing hypospray, he gripped her uninjured shoulder to prevent her retreat. "Hold still, I said." He pressed the tip to her shoulder and injected the medication.

She was still crying, great, hitching sobs that frightened him with their intensity, but he saw the anesthetic take hold. Her body lost some of its cadaverous rigidity, and her arm went utterly slack, fingers splayed at the end of her hand like a dead albino spider. When he was sure it would cause no pain, he lifted her arm and probed the muscles and tendons. He felt a minor pull in her shoulder and a moderate tear in her elbow. Neither were serious, but they would've hurt like hell, especially with her spasticity increasing the pressure on the injuries.

"I'll have you fixed up in no time," he assured her, and grabbed a tissue regenerator. "You want to tell me what's going on?"

She looked at him with swollen eyes. "You should have left me in that cryotube," she answered, and the force of her sobs doubled. 

He blinked, stunned. That was the last thing he expected to hear. "Stop talking nonsense," he snapped. _What brought this on?_

"It's not," she managed through her tears. "I'm just space junk." She loosed another wail and tried to curl in on herself. "You should've let me die. I would've been asleep. I never would have known." She heaved and rocked from side to side on the bed. "Now I'm going to know. Now I'm going to feel all of it." She keened, a wordless howl of misery and fear that made his stomach clench.

He willed himself to keep the tissue regenerator steady and his voice even. "That's enough, Miss Walker. You need to take a deep breath and get a grip. Your vitals are out of control. Now, you listen to me. Do you hear me? Nod if you do."

She nodded.

"Good. Deep breath in." She drew a shaky, rattling breath. "Hold it. Now let it out. Nice and slow." She exhaled in a protracted whoosh. "Again."

It took a good half-dozen repetitions before her heart rate and blood pressure dropped to acceptable levels and another three before they returned to normal. Two more, and the incessant sobs began to taper into glottal, exhausted whimpers.

"Good," he said softly, and finished treating her injuries with a final, precise stroke of the regenerator. "I'm going to leave your arm numb for a minute to let the treatment set. In the meantime, you're going to tell me what brought this on." He dropped the regenerator onto a tray and pulled a stool to her bedside.

"I had a nightmare. I was in the cryotube, and it was dark and cold. Something was wrong. I wasn't supposed to be awake, but I was. I could feel the tubes in my throat, and the suspension fluid. It was pouring into my mouth and nose, and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I was drowning, and I couldn't see, and I didn't want to die alone in some metal tube." She started to cry again, but without her earlier ferocity. It was quiet and strengthless, as though each breath required more strength than she had left.

"When I woke up, it was pitch dark," she continued. 

He frowned. Sickbay was programmed to run ambient lights mounted above each biobed after the main lights were dimmed. It should have been dark, but not absolutely so. A patient could arrive at any time, and doctors and nurses needed to be able to assess injuries and read ampoule labels. "Are you sure?"

Another nod. Tears dripped across the bridge of her nose.

He turned on the stool and stuck his head around the curtain. "Yeoman," he called to an orderly turning pillows for want of anything better to do. "Did the lights go out in here earlier tonight?"

He nodded. "But only for a second."

"Why?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Well, find out. Go ask Mr. Scott, and if he doesn't know, then have him send a team to run a diagnostic on the electrical systems in here."

He straightened, eyes bright with sudden purpose. "Yes, sir." He returned the pillow to the bed and scurried off to fulfill his mission.

_That doesn't explain all the carrying on about being space junk and wanting to die,_ his father noted, and he spun to face the bed again. "What was all that business about wanting to die?" he prodded.

She sniffled. "I don't want to die, but if I'm going to, I'd rather it be quick."

"What are you talking about? Aside from your CP, you're perfectly healthy."

"Now, yeah," she agreed. "But I won't be if Dr. Boswell gets a hold of me. I looked her up after our talk this morning."

_Of course you did,_ he thought dourly. He was tempted to confiscate her padd, but it was her only connection to a world beyond the ship, so he let it be. "What about her?"

"She's an orthopedist, all right, but she's also a researcher and a bioethicist. If you leave me with her, I'm going to die like a lab rat in a cage, and God knows how long it'll take." The crying, which had subsided, returned with a sudden, furious vengeance, and the monitors above her head showed high, dangerous spikes in adrenaline and cortisol.

"Miss Walker, you are being ridiculous," he said flatly. "She might have the bedside manner of a dead carp, but she's a doctor, and a good one by her extensive resume. She's bound by the Hippocratic oath to do no harm."

"So were the ones who did this to me," she snarled, and gestured to the scars on her thighs and behind her knees. "So were the ones who made me stand in a wooden box for hours until I hit muscle exhaustion. So were the ones who stuffed me into that tube and forgot me for two hundred and forty years." She looked at him, beseeching and furious, and then she simply dissolved, mouth open in a soundless cry of anguish.

He thought of the boy in that godawful box, weeping and pleading for release while nurses offered bloodless platitudes and empty encouragement and his forebearers circled him like carrion crows and documented his torment with video cameras and notes scrawled in their indecipherable hand. He thought of her nightmare, of drowning in the dark in the vast nothingness of space with none to witness her passing but the cold, inscrutable faces of the stars. He thought of waking up in the dark to the stink of antiseptic and a squad of orderlies eager to pin you down for the brief, sucking kiss of a hypospray wielded by a doctor you knew only as the one on the night shift.

_Oh, sweetheart. It's going to be all right, I promise you._

The doctor in him knew he couldn't touch her, couldn't wrap her in a blanket and an embrace and rock her until the hysteria loosed its hold, but the man in him simply couldn't sit there and watch her thrash in the clutches of a thousand old terrors, and so he scooted his stool closer to the bed and rested a hand on her knee. "You're on the _Enterprise_ , he reminded her. "As long as you're under my watch, nobody's going to hurt you, you hear?"

"That's the point," she cried. "I'm not going to be under your watch. I'm going to be under hers, and God knows what happens to you when no one else can see. God, some of the things she writes..." She tried to enfold herself in a protective embrace, but her numbed arm refused to cooperate, so she clutched her belly with her good arm and wept.

"What things?" he asked blankly.

She flapped her hand at her padd, which lay on the tray table at the foot of her bed, and he maneuvered himself within reach with a deft shuffle of his feet and picked it up. He tapped the screen to wake it from sleep and quickly accessed her viewing history. Articles on Atlanta, starting from 2020 and moving steadily forward. Genealogical research on Walkers and Peabodys.

_She's looking for her family,_ he thought, and his chest tightened in sympathy.

So much research in so few days, all annotated and highlighted. It was amazing, really, and he would have researched it further and talked to her about it if he weren't so focused on getting to the bottom of her sudden fear of Dr. Boswell and its attendant fatalistic certainty of a terrible, lingering death in the bowels of some sadistic medical laboratory. He filed it away for future reference and created a search filter for Dr. Moira Boswell.

And was promptly greeted by one hundred pages of results.

_Good God, she must have been at this all day, probably from the minute I headed to the bridge this morning._

_Well, what else does she have to do all day besides watch the walls close in and the orderlies fiddle with the pillows?_

He searched within the results for "bioethics" and medical history. That turned up a more manageable twenty-five results. He settled on the stool and selected the first one, and within ten lines, he understood her previously-inexplicable terror of a woman she knew only by name. The spittle soured in his mouth and evaporated altogether, and he wished the stool had a back to hold him up, and for a shot of bourbon to ease his flaring conscience. He lowered the padd and looked at Rosalie, who watched him in miserable silence.

_See?_ her expression said, and he did. He saw so very clearly.

"I want to go home," she told him. I want my memaw." And then she simply broke, crying so hard she couldn't breathe. The wails rose and fell like warbling klaxons and drew Pennicott from the prep room hypospray in hand.

"No," he said. "She doesn't need another damn needle."

_What she needs is to be held by someone who loves her, surrounded by familiar smells and familiar skins and the comforting sounds of home,_ he thought bleakly as the full weight of her loss had its ugly, cruel way with her.

_You should've let me die,_ she reproached him inside his head, and he wondered if she wasn't right, if it wouldn't have been kinder to let her sleep until the aging cryotube failed and scattered the dust of her bones across the galaxy.

_No. It's thinking like that that got your father killed. You gave in to his pleading. You stopped trying and let him go with a press of your hypospray, and three weeks later, they unveiled the drugs that would've saved him. Don't you dare make that mistake again, Leonard McCoy. Don't you dare give up._

"I want my memaw, she repeated, as though she thought him capable of such a miracle.

_You know that feeling, don't you, Leo? That particular grief has been festering in your heart since they laid your father in the ground. Six years on, and even though you know death is forever, you still hope he'll come walking through your door one day, farmer's brogans clumping on the floor and eyes bright and lucid beneath the brim of his hat._

"I know you do." And I'd give her to you if I could, sweetheart. I surely would. "Hush now," he soothed, and rubbed her shivering leg from ankle to knee. "Hush. Whatever happens isn't happening tonight. You're safe here, I promise you."

He sat at her bedside and stroked her leg until taut muscles went slack and her erratic breathing evened out, and then he rose and went to the replicator, where he ordered half a glass of warm milk dusted with cinnamon. He carried it to her tray table and set it down. "I want you to drink this. It'll help you sleep." He toggled a switch on the side of the bed and raised the head to a sitting position. "Do you need help holding it?"

She took a deep breath and wiped her red-rimmed eyes. "I don't think so." She snagged the tray with uncoordinated, pawing fingers and pulled it closer. She slowly curled both hands around the mug and closed her eyes at the warmth that seeped into her palms, and then she raised it to her lips and took a careful sip.

_That's my girl,_ he thought. _Slow and easy._ He watched the monitors with satisfaction as her vitals improved and her cortisol levels declined to less terrifying levels.

"It's my grandmother's recipe," he said.

Her bottom lip wobbled precariously at that, and he was sure his idiot mouth had undone the milk's comforting work, but then she replied, "Grandmamas always seem to know best, don't they?"

"Yeah, they do," he agreed, and saw a flash of his own paternal grandmother, a short, bowlegged woman with leathery skin and smiling eyes who flitted around the farmhouse kitchen during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the annual family barbecue, and who always saved the biggest piece of peach pie just for him. "You drink that down now," he admonished her, but there was no heat in it, and his fingers itched to brush a strand of hair from her damp face.

She obliged without a whimper. She was spent after the night's histrionics, and her eyelids drooped over unfocused eyes. The mug was listing badly by the end, held only by the lax crook of her fingers through the handle, and only the fact that it was nearly empty spared them from a repeat of this morning. When she had downed the final mouthful, he plucked it from her drowsy grasp and set it on the edge of his desk.

"You go on to sleep now," he urged, and lowered the bed to its original position.

She blinked sleepily at him. 'M sorry 'bout the ruckus, Doctor."

"Don't you worry about it. They're just bedpans. They wash." He pulled the blanket over her shoulders.

"G'night."

"Goodnight, Miss Walker." 

He waited until her breathing deepened and settled into the unmistakable rhythm of sound sleep, and then he picked up her padd, transferred her research into the illustrious Dr. Boswell to his, and marched out of sickbay with it clenched in his fist like a stone.

Rosalie might have been settled, but he had never been less, and as he stalked onto the turbolift and ascended to the captain's quarters, his mind seethed with snippets from the essay he'd glimpsed before she had gone into total meltdown.

_Given what you saw, can you blame her?_ his father asked. _That was bad enough. She probably read the whole thing, driven by boredom and that natural, tenacious curiosity of hers. And God knows what's in it. Curiosity has an awful way of turning on those who wield it._

_How the hell did I miss it?_ he wondered as the lift glided to a stop and deposited him on the deck.

_You were busy, son. She might be your only patient, but she's not your only responsibility. There were inventories to double-check and requisition forms to fill out and performance reviews to conduct. Not to mention your personal research and experiments and peer reviews for various medical journals. It's not like you were laying down on the job. You did the best you could with the time you had._

_Well, it wasn't enough,_ he remonstrated as he stormed down the corridor, scattering yeomen like startled pigeons as he went. _If she hadn't had so much time on her hands, I'd've merrily sent her to that woman with her wheelchair door prize and never given it a second thought. Dammit! How could I have been so careless?_

_Like a lab rat in a cage,_ Rosalie said dolefully inside his head, and a boy in a wooden box screamed and screamed.

Jim, untroubled by glaring failures, was sound asleep, and thus, his door was firmly shut when he started pounding on it with the side of his fist.

"Jim, get up," he called, and drummed furiously on the door. "Dammit, Jim, up! Don't make me use a medical emergency override."

Muffled muttering from inside Jim's quarters. The rustle of bedclothes. The door slid open to reveal Jim, silhouetted in the darkness of his cabin, nothing more than a rumpled shock of hair and a flicker of socked feet. "Wha' th' hell, Bones?" he slurred, and McCoy heard the whisper of nails on bare skin. "Lights," Jim, grunted, and the room was illuminated in a wash of white.

McCoy barreled inside without waiting for an invitation. "I'm not giving her to that woman, Jim," he announced.

Jim squinted at him. "What the hell are you talking about?" He yawned and scratched the inside of his thigh.

"Rosalie. I'm not giving her to Dr. Boswell."

Jim groaned and rubbed his eyes. "Bones, I love your passion, I really do, but this couldn't have waited until morning?"

"No, it couldn't. I just finished peeling her off the ceiling in sickbay. Took half an hour and a glass of warm milk to calm her down. One of my damn orderlies sprained her arm."

"She get violent?" His voice was still rough with sleep, but his eyes were clearing rapidly, and McCoy could see the gears of his mind picking up speed.

"Hysterical, more like. She had some kind of nightmare about drowning in her cryotube, and when she woke up, the power was out in sickbay."

That caught his attention. "What do you mean out?"

McCoy shrugged. "Some kind of momentary blip, to hear a yeoman tell it. I sent him down to engineering to see about it."

Jim hummed in approval. "Let me know what they find." When he wasn't nearly getting the ship blown to pieces by hostile aliens or crazy admirals, he was meticulous in its care. He might've skimmed every textbook he ever had in the Academy, but damned if he didn't read every letter of Scotty's frequent maintenance reports.

"You know I will," McCoy said. "Dammit, Jim, I'm more worried about Rosalie. I'm not giving her to that woman."

Jim peered at him with sleep-swollen eyes. "What's gotten such a bee in your bonnet about this? I thought you said she was preeminent in her field."

"She is, but dammit, Jim." He stopped and rubbed his nape, and in his mind's eye, he saw Rosalie thrashing in the grips of those cack-handed orderlies and cowering from the advancing Dr. Pennicott and his hypo of good intentions.

"Bones," Jim said, "I know you've got a thing for strays, but sometimes you've got to let them go. This Boswell might be able to help her." He gave him a bracing pat on the arm.

"The hell she will. She'll hurt her, Jim. She'll hurt her bad, and I can't just stand by and let it happen because Boswell's got more paper on the wall."

_I can't just pass her off like an old dollar bill and pretend I don't know what might happen to her. I do that, and I'll see her behind my eyelids every night for the rest of my life. She and my father might take up checkers on the front porch. He collected strays, too._

"Why are you so convinced that Boswell's a bad idea?" Jim asked, exasperated.

McCoy thrust his padd at him. "That's why." He tapped the screen with his finger.

Jim took the padd from him and shuffled to his couch, scratching all the while. He sat with a graceful plop and motioned for him to follow suit, but he only crossed his arms and swayed from side to side and tried not to think of Rosalie in that sickbay bed, keening for a memaw who was never coming, or of dying horses thrashing in their stalls with bloody foam in their nostrils.

_Like old space junk,_ she hissed inside his head. _You should have let me die._

_Please, son. Please._

Jim's eyes, which had been scanning the screen, froze.

_Found it,_ McCoy thought, but there was no satisfaction in it.

Jim read for a long time. Now and then, his free hand rose to his mouth, and he worried his thumbnail with his teeth. It was a habit of long standing, and no matter how long or how loudly he nagged him about it, he did it anyway. He'd long since learned to pick his battles when it came to Jim, so he smothered the rebuke that bubbled to his lips and pretended not to notice.

"It could just be a holdover from her Academy or med school days," he said when he was finished, but the words lacked conviction, and his posture betrayed his unease. Hunched and shrunken, as though he were ducking a blow. He lowered his thumb and immediately raised it again. "You know, didn't you take rhetoric classes?"

He had, in fact, and the professors had made him argue several controversial opinions, opinions he found loathsome and utterly contrary to his decency as a human being. He'd done it, white-knuckled and thin-lipped and desperate for the grade and the promise of doctorhood, but he'd never been easy with it, had never brushed it off as easily as his classmates, who'd defended the indefensible and swanned from the lecture hall with laughter on their lips. Guilt had burned in his belly and clung to his skin like the humid Missouri heat, and he'd left the hall on numb legs and made a beeline for the shower and a shot of Beam to rid his mouth of a taste bitter as gall.

"Yeah," he admitted. "I did. "But I don't think that's what this is." He gestured at the padd. "One I could buy, but it's not just one." Jim's finger skimmed the screen to bring up the list of links. Besides, most professors don't keep students' old papers for more than a semester, and they certainly don't publish them years later, not unless they're looking to either bury them or hop on some bandwagon. I'd bet my last credit those are recent. They certainly sound like a doctor." He thought of that long-ago boy, screaming inside a wooden box.

Jim scanned another page, pinched and silent, hunched over the padd now, and McCoy's mouth twitched with the urge to snap at him to sit up, dammit, but he needed him to see, so he held his tongue. Jim's eyes flew down the page, and his scissoring teeth scraped the cuticle of his thumb raw.

"Stop that," he chided helplessly.

Jim raised his eyes from the padd. "Hm?"

"You're going to gnaw it off."

He looked at his thumb as though he couldn't quite remember how it had gotten there, and maybe he couldn't. When Jim finally set his mind to something, there was nothing under God's heaven that could shake him from his purpose. He lowered his wounded thumb to his lap. "Sorry, Bones," he said sheepishly.

"How many times have I told you?" He crossed to the couch and reached for his pouch of hypos and regenerators before he remembered it wasn't there. In his haste to reach the calamity unfolding in sickbay, he'd left them on his bedside table. "Shit."

"Don't worry about it, Bones. Mankind survived for thousands of years without the intervention of modern medicine."

"They also died by the untold thousands," he reminded him. "I don't suppose you have anything in your bathroom?"

"It's a little raw skin, not a gaping phaser wound. I'll be fine." When he only grunted at him, Jim added, "I'll get it treated as soon as we're done here." He promptly wiped his thumb on his boxers. "Besides, I thought we were more worried about your newest favorite patient."

McCoy scowled. "I can damn well worry about more than one thing at a time."

"Don't I know it," Jim retorted drily, and he was tempted to slap the smartass out of him.

"Those essays, Jim. Jesus. Do I want to know how bad they got?"

"No," he answered, and the immediacy of the response made his blood pound in his ears. "How did you find them?"

"I didn't. She did. She's got a lot of hours to kill when she isn't in therapy. I guess when I told her about the probable transfer this morning, she decided to look up just what she had to look forward to."

"Bet she enjoyed that," Jim said wryly, and grimaced.

"Yeah." Guilt churned in his gut.

_I'm just old space junk, and they can do whatever they want with me._

He plopped down in a chair and scrubbed his face with his hands. "Good God. I don't understand how she got into Starfleet with views like that."

"They don't exactly have the most rigorous admissions standards, Bones. I mean, look at me." Jim's lips twitched in a self-deprecating smirk.

He snorted. "My ass, Jim. You're a damn genius when you want to be."

"Maybe she hid it, toed the line through med school and the Academy and only let her freak flag fly when the ink was dry on her credentials. Look at Admiral Marcus. He was researching and developing those Dreadnaught-class starships for years, and no one suspected a thing. No one would have suspected a thing, either, if I hadn't listened to Khan and opened that torpedo. He had everyone fooled, including Pike."

_You're wrong, Jim,_ he thought morosely. _It wasn't that no one suspected; it's that no one cared. You don't build a fleet of military starships by yourself. He had help, and a lot of it. Marcus wasn't the only one. He was just the only one crazy enough to get caught. Starfleet knows it, too. That's why it didn't exactly leave no stone unturned when it came to investigating the mess. A few token discharges, forced retirements, and a high-ranking sacrificial lamb to serve a pissant prison sentence, and it trumpeted its exhaustive relief and restoration efforts. They didn't want to look too hard because then they'd have a whole hell of a lot of explaining to do._

_Just imagine what the medical branch of Section 31 must be like,_ whispered a brittle voice at the base of his brain, and he saw Rosalie in cold, metal stirrups with an even colder speculum jammed between her legs.

"That doesn't explain how that garbage cleared peer review," he said, and swallowed against a wave of nausea.

_Now, son, you know that ain't true,_ said his father. Kind but firm, disappointment and impending discipline. _There are plenty of fine doctors out there, good men and women doing the best they can and using their God-given gifts to help folks who're hurting, but there are also bad ones, folks with noble intentions but no skills or white-coated bureaucrats with all the skill in the world but neither kindness nor conscience in them. Boswell is one of the latter, and she's not the only one. There are plenty like her in labs all over the galaxy, so blinkered by hypotheticals and the possibilities of tomorrow that they can't see the patient sitting in front of them today. They've gotten smarter since the days of Philip Greene and his glorious eugenics plan for a better day, better at hiding, and there are far fewer of them than there used to be, thank God for small favors, but they're still there, practicing their nasty little magic behind closed doors and calling it progress._

He thought of Admiral Marcus, driven mad by his obsession and xenophobia and willing to sacrifice a crew that included his daughter to advance his twisted cause, and of a small boy tortured by the hands charged with healing him. He thought of Rosalie, whose parents were so desperate to fix her that they sealed her inside a cryotube and sent her to God on the promise of con artists.

_I'll be a lab rat in a cage._

Lab rat. Space junk. Christ almighty. "I don't care how it got past peer review. I'm not giving her up, not to them."

"I'm with you, Bones, but if this Dr. Boswell has clout, it might not matter."

"There has to be something, Jim!" Pleading. "Dammit, I can't just wake her up and dust her off and send her off to a life of God knows what."

Jim regarded him in thoughtful silence. "I've always known you had a bleeding heart," he said at last, "but you're invested even for you. What is it with her?"

_Because sometimes I see her. Not just her body--skinny legs and lopsided hips and clumsy fingers--but her, the spark that makes her Rosalie. I catch flashes of her sometimes when she says good morning and goodnight, and when she's bent over her padd, so absorbed in the screen that I have to remind her to hold herself up. She gives me a sheepish grin and a quiet apology, and in her shy smile, I see the lovely woman she is when she's not wracked with pain and constantly being reminded of the piss-poor vessel the Almighty saw fit to stuff her into. I see her when she smiles and when she laughs at my cantankerous grumbling. I see her when she rolls up and down sickbay in the chair I gave her and turns figure-eights for the sheer, happy hell of it. I see her when she forgets how much she hurts._

_Are you all right?_ Quiet concern at his back as he'd pretended not to see her in favor of sheets he hadn't cared about in weeks, soft and solicitous and more than he deserved given that he'd been avoiding her for days because he couldn't bring himself to tell her that the rug was about to be yanked from under her unsteady feet all over again.

Sweetness and tenacity and a lively spirit encumbered by flesh too weak to contain it. Goodness, pure and simple, and he couldn't stand aside and allow it to be poisoned by ruthless scientific curiosity and the bland indifference of Starfleet bureaucrats.

"Because she'll die," he said flatly. "Her body might go on, maybe for decades, but there's more to a human being than meat and bone. There's a soul, Jim, and they'll crush it. They might not mean to, but they won't care if they do. She's not space junk, Jim, not a goddamn lab rat for them to play with. She has a name and a past and a hell of a mind, one that might do a hell of a lot in this world if given the chance. She's not a rolling petri dish or an anomaly to be studied and dissected. She deserves to have a life, one she chooses, with trees and grass and the sun on her face. It's my duty as a doctor worth the name to see she has that chance."

"No offense, Bones, but most doctors would consider that going far beyond the call of duty."

"Yeah, well. I'm not most doctors." He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. 

"No, you're not," Jim agreed. He scratched the bridge of his nose and flashed him a fond smile. Then he studied the padd again, and the smile faded. He set it on the couch and stood. "The ride's never smooth," he muttered, and crossed to the com on the wall beside the door. He thumbed it on. "Kirk to Commander Spock."

"Yes, Captain," came the reply, and he wondered how the pointy-eared bastard could sound so goddamned awake at ass o'clock in the morning.

_You're awake._

_Yeah, but I'm not happy about it._

"Report to my quarters immediately."

"Yes, Captain." The com clicked off.

Five minutes later, Spock was at the door, impeccable in his blues.

"Did you even sleep?" MCCoy demanded, irked at his bright eyes, polished boots and perfectly-combed hair.

"Yes, Doctor." Crisp as his uniform. He cocked his head as though studying an intriguing zoological specimen, and McCoy was suddenly acutely aware of how he must look, with his puffy eyes and disheveled hair and sweatpants. "I take it you did not?" 

"Not near as much as I wanted," he admitted, and rubbed his burning eyes.

"C'mon in, Spock." Jim yawned and waved him in.

Spock stepped inside, hands clasped behind his back. "Based on the lateness of the hour and the state of your dress, I presume this is an emergency?" He looked from Jim to him and back again.

"No, Spock, I thought I'd round you and the captain up for a game of midnight poker," he snapped. His head throbbed with the need for sleep, and he was in no mood for his persnickety bullshit.

Spock merely quirked an eyebrow.

Jim scooped the padd from the sofa and passed it to him. "Miss Walker found these this afternoon during her adventures with her padd."

Spock perused the contents, face impassive. "They appear to be a series of apologies for Philip Greene's eugenics polices in the late twenty-first century. While the ideas expressed are undeniably worrisome and repugnant, I fail to see why they warrant an emergency meeting in the middle of the night."

"Look who wrote them," Jim said.

Spock's eyebrows crept toward his hairline. Vulcan for surprise. "'Dr. Moira Boswell'," he read. "Is this the same Dr. Boswell who requested to examine the doctor's patient?"

"I'm right here," he grumbled. "And her name is Rosalie."

"It is," Jim answered, ignoring him.

"I can't turn her over to someone like that. It goes against my every instinct as a doctor." _And as a man._

"While I appreciate your position, Doctor, I am afraid there is nothing we can do. As she is not recognized as a Federation citizen or a citizen of its protectorates, the customary rules do not apply."

"You've said that, dammit. But there's got to be something. We can't just-" He gestured furiously at the padd. "You're a scientist. You know what can happen when science is utterly divorced from ethics."

"You said the rules don't apply because she's not a Federation citizen," Jim mused.

"That is correct."

"Well, what would it take to confer citizenship status?"

"If records for her exist, then they could be entered into current Federation databases, provided that she could provide corroborative evidence of her identity."

"All her papers were probably incinerated in the nuclear attack on Atlanta. Even if they weren't, it's not like they packed them in her cryotube," McCoy said, and ran his fingers through his hair.

"Papers would be irrelevant. As you might recall, records of her existence do exist from the accident at the cryotube facility. Samples of her DNA were taken for identification purposes. I presume your preliminary physical took additional samples?"

"Of course. It's standard protocol."

Spock nodded. "Once genetic identity has been established, then she would need to present herself for an interview to ensure that she is, in fact, real and not an android or a hologram. Once those criteria are met, she would be presented with official identification and granted the full rights and protections of a Federation citizen. Including the right to refuse treatment from Dr. Boswell and retain Dr. McCoy as her primary physician."

"How long would the process take?" Jim was chewing on his abused thumb again.

"As Dr. McCoy has already collected the necessary samples and performed a thorough physical, and I have already discovered her DNA sample in the cryolab records, it should take only a few moments to establish a match. The interview, however, will prove considerably more difficult. The wait can be weeks."

"We don't have weeks. We're scheduled to arrive at Starbase 4517 in three days," he pointed out.

"While my skills as a science officer are considerable, even I cannot bend time," Spock said with implacable pomposity.

"Maybe not, but maybe I can," Jim said thoughtfully.

When Spock raised a decidedly skeptical eyebrow at that, McCoy was in perfect accord.

"I do not understand, Captain."

"Being the golden boy who saved the Federation twice in two years has to count for something, right?" he answered, and flashed a sunny, boyish grin. "Spock, see about matching that DNA. Bones, you keep Miss Walker healthy and happy."

"And what are you going to do?" he asked.

"I'm going to call in a few favors at Starfleet command." He clapped him on the arm. "Don't worry, Bones, we got this." He ambled to the com again. "Kirk to bridge."

"Yes, Captain?"

"Increase speed to Warp Eight. I want to get there with time to spare."

"Yes, sir."

Jim flipped off the com and offered him another grin, cocksure and rumpled and impossibly young as he moved to save the day in nothing but his undershorts, and in that moment, he loved him, loved him as fiercely as he had ever loved his wife or his sainted mother, and he thanked God that he'd taken the chance and offered him his name and his flask on that godforsaken shuttlecraft. _He might be a pain in the ass, but I couldn't have picked a better friend._

He bounced on his toes, discomfited by the sudden wave of sentimentality. "I better get on back to sickbay, make sure she's not tearing it up again," he said gruffly.

"You do that. And make sure to follow up on that power fluctuation."

"Yes, sir. Goodnight, Jim. Spock." He nodded in farewell and took his leave. 

Spock followed him into the corridor. "I should have results for you in twenty minutes."

"Good."

Spock increased his pace and disappeared around a bend in the corridor. He returned to the turbolift and then to sickbay, where he found Dr. Pennicott sitting at his desk with an air of rumpled dignity. The scattered bedpans had been collected and returned to their cart, and Rosalie was dead to the world, curled on her side and snoring softly into her pillow.

"Everything all right in here?" he whispered.

"Tip-top," Pennicott replied, and tugged on the fabric of his tunic. "She's been out since you left."

"I expect she'll sleep until morning now. Wake me if she doesn't."

"Of course, Doctor."

"I didn't mean to step on your toes earlier."

"Nonsense. As I said, you are CMO. Besides, she seems to have an affinity for you."

He looked at Rosalie as she snored beneath the blanket, her face smooth and unspoiled by tears. He thought of her in the hydrotherapy pool, a small, broken bird huddled against his chest, and of her hand warm and soft in his own.

_She just knows a safe place when she sees one,_ his father said, and the pride in it made his jaw ache.

"Just keep an eye on her," he ordered, and left as quickly as he had come. He marched to his quarters, convinced he wouldn't be able to sleep, but he was out the minute his head hit the pillow, and when his com buzzed with the DNA results Spock promised fifteen minutes later, he did not stir.


	9. A Spoonful of Sugar to Help the Medicine Go Down

The lights of the starbase were far too bright for her gritty, sleepless eyes as she followed the bright blue of Spock's tunic down the wide, bustling corridor. Unlike Dr. McCoy, who did his best to match his stride to hers, Spock strode purposefully ahead of her, spine ramrod-straight and hands clasped behind his back. 

_I don't understand how he can be so awake at God o'clock in the morning,_ she groused, and snapped her wrists forward on the handrims in an effort to catch up.

"Where's the fire?" she called, and stifled a yawn.

"As far as I know, there is no fire on the starbase," came the crisp reply, and long strides stretched longer.

"Well, there certainly seems to be one under your behind," she muttered.

He drew up at that and turned. "Apologies, Miss Walker," he said. "It is imperative, however, that we establish your identity and Terran citizenship before your examination by Dr. Boswell tomorrow morning. As such, I suggest we hurry. If you would like, I could push you to the social worker's office."

She considered the offer. She was exhausted from a sleepless night spent staring at the dimmed light above her bed and listening to the clandestine scrape of crepe-soled shoes as yeomen and night nurses had gone about their appointed rounds. A dull-eyed Nurse Ogawa had scraped her out of bed at five o'clock in the morning to hose her down and comb her hair and dress her in replicated clothes that felt far too stiff and binding after weeks of loose scrubs, and a raw-eyed Dr. McCoy had arrived just after a breakfast she'd scarcely touched to look her over and offer words of encouragement that had blurred around the edges.

_It's going to be all right, Miss Walker,_ he'd assured her, soft summer rain against her face as he sat on his stool in his doctorly splay and fussed with the straps of her AFOs. _It's just a routine interview. I've already sent on your DNA results, so this is just a bit of pro forma hurdle-jumping. Just relax and answer his questions, and everything will be fine._ He'd undone the ankle strap of her AFO and fastened it again, and then he'd nodded and gone to the replicator for a cup of coffee black as it came.

Blinking up at Spock, she wished she'd asked him for a cup. All she wanted to do was curl up beneath a blanket in sickbay and sleep, lulled by the rhythmic chirp of the monitor bank above her biobed and the rustle and clatter of the doctor's industrious puttering.

"Thank you kindly for the offer, Commander, but Dr. McCoy'd have my head. It's bad enough I'm missing a day of therapy. Where is he, anyway?" She'd thought he would be the one to escort her to her appointment, but he'd had disembarked as soon as docking was complete, face set and stride brisk.

"The doctor is preparing your casefile," Spock answered, and spun on his heel to resume his march.

_Bless his heart. He's trying so hard,_ she thought, and her eyes burned with unspoken gratitude.

"He's certainly thorough," she said.

"He is a remarkable physician," Spock agreed as he hurtled down the corridor. "He would be an even better one were he not so prone to his passions."

"Prone to his passions," she repeated, and her arms churned as she struggled to keep pace. "You say that like it's a bad thing, Commander. I find his 'passions' refreshing."

"Emotions are not logical," he countered. "They cloud one's judgment and lead to errors."

"And sometimes it's a blessing to be treated by someone who sees you as more than an opinionated science experiment gone wrong," she retorted.

That earned her a quirked eyebrow and a speculative sidelong glance, but Spock said nothing, and she followed doggedly in his wake as he sped around a curve. Her shoulders burned despite the balance and responsiveness of her chair, and she cursed the man for his effortless agility.

_Like a billy goat,_ she thought peevishly, and her wrists snapped, snapped, snapped on her handrims as the wheels glided over the smooth, grey floor.

_Everything is grey,_ she thought. _Grey and white and translucent. Grey floors, grey walls, grey beds, and grey tables. It's like living inside a computer._

_Can you live like this, big sister?_ Daniel needled. _Can you spend the next year living in a sterile, steel womb where the only splashes of color come from the uniforms folks are wearing? Can you make a life worth living in a world without light, without the sound of rain on the windows or dripping off the front porch? Without the smell of fresh-cut grass and roses on the air? Without the taste of real honey? Without the nap of carpet or the coolness of hardwood beneath your bare feet? Can you live in a drab, dead world of the bare minimum?_

_What kind of life is it going to be for you? You weren't built for the world you came from, and you never quite fit no matter how much money Mama and Daddy wasted trying to pound their warped little peg into a respectable round hole. How are you going to fit in here when the world has done the sensible thing, the kinder thing, and weeded you out, erased you with a wave of their bioscanners and laser scalpels and neural regenerators? You're a dinosaur here, a relic from an uglier time. Education might've saved you, but everything you know is two hundred and fifty years out of date. You've got precious little to offer the world, less than nothing, really, and if you stay here, you'll just be taking up space and living on charity._

_It's only for a year,_ she reasoned, and weaved past a tall, slender woman in security reds with a phaser holstered at one hip. _After that, I'll be free to do what I want. If Dr. McCoy's not fibbing about housing being free, it shouldn't be too hard to find a place or see about getting something modified. Once I get a roof over my head and get nested in, I can think about going back to school and dusting off my old chops. Maybe I'll go back to UGA. Hell, since it's free these days, maybe I'll try for Emory or Mercer._

The thought of going home inspired a swooning anticipation that was equal parts dread and exhilaration. She'd wasted no time in researching the city she'd called home until her parents had preserved her like so many summer peaches, and what she'd found as she'd scrolled through thousands of images had filled her with wonder and confusion and a white-knuckled homesickness that had dizzied her. So much was the same, and so much was different. Centennial Olympic Park was still in its place at the heart of the city, but the bench where she and Grandmama had spent a hot, lazy afternoon watching the menfolk go by was long gone, replaced by a glossy, black, holographic memorial to the millions who had been vaporized by a direct nuclear strike during World War III. The buildings of her lifetime were gone, too, and in their stead were edifices of steel and glass. Most were utilitarian--parking garages and office buildings with stoic facades full of polarized windows--but a handful had been stunning in their unexpected beauty, delicate works of graceful steel and glass that curved and belled as though blown from a glass blower's pipe and left to harden in defiance of gravity. She'd stared at them in mute wonder for a long time, mesmerized.

_We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto,_ she'd thought, not for the first time, and asked a passing orderly for a glass of water, the consumption of which he'd duly noted on her chart.

Memorials to a holocaust of which she had no knowledge and buildings wrought from water and quicksilver, and yet, here and there had been faint glimmers of recognition. There had been verdant greens interspersed among the concrete and steel, sunny parks spread under the clear, blue sky. Trees rose from the soil and spread their branches and venerable grandeur over the earth and the occasional person sprawled in their shade with a book and a Thermos of sweet tea. Flowers bordered the sidewalks and winding trails, and folks still held their love of wrought-iron and delicate scrollwork. The South in which she'd been nurtured was distant history, buried beneath ash and defiant renewal, but its echoes endured, and perhaps it would remember its old hospitality and take its prodigal daughter home again.

_And what if it doesn't? What if it rejects you just like our parents did?_ her brother asked, spite and bile on his tongue. _Or what if McCoy's right and he doesn't have the clout to save you from Dr. Boswell and her needles and her spartan cot in some barren room? What if you spend the rest of your miserable life an exhibit in her dreadful medical menagerie, parading your defects like a whore on display in a Louisiana cathouse and performing tricks like a good little monkey, singing for your reconstituted supper for people who can't or won't hear the melody behind it? What if you spend the rest of your life never hearing that slow, Southern drawl, bourbon and sweet tea on the tongue?_

She closed her eyes against her brother's malignant voice and focused on Spock's narrow back. Her heart hammered inside her chest, and her palms prickled with sweat. She wanted Dr. McCoy and his churlish grumping and his subconscious gallantry. She wanted his soft eyes and softer hands that belied his dour facade. Mostly, she wanted his voice, that familiar lilt that spoke of red clay and sweet grass and fried-chicken Sunday suppers.

_I want to go home,_ she thought, and panic welled in her stomach and bubbled behind her sternum like an impending hiccup. _I want Dr. McCoy, and I want to go home._

_The doctor is busy trying to help you, darlin',_ her grandmother said. _And home is long gone, baby. Whatever's left of it is riding around in your bones. You're just gonna have to get on as best you can._

She faltered, palms skidding against the handgrips, and drew to a jerky halt in the middle of the corridor. Spock, oblivious, walked on for several yards before he registered the sudden absence of her on the periphery of his vision. He stopped and turned, but did not retrace his steps. "Miss Walker?" His tone was cool, almost stentorian, but his eyes were curious.

She took a deep breath and reestablished her rhythm. "Sorry, Commander," she said with brittle determination. "I'm just scared, is all. And I want to go home."

She expected him to quirk another thick eyebrow dark as bootblack at that, but he didn't. Instead, he regarded her in contemplative silence for a long moment. "Fear is understandable but unnecessary," he said at last, and she sputtered to hear compassion rendered in the clipped language of absolute logic. "As the doctor should have explained to you, this is merely an interview to satisfy Federation regulations. As your identity has already been established through DNA, this is a formality." He resumed his trek, though more slowly than before.

"But what if I blow it?"

He did arch an eyebrow at that. "I do not see how that would be possible."

She shrugged. "Mr. Spock, I promise you I have managed some feats in my time. What if I make a fool of myself? I don't exactly know the rules of this Federation."

"The exhibition of irrational or poor behavior will not bar you from Federation citizenship," Spock assured her as they neared the turbolift. "If that were the case, the Federation would soon find itself in want of citizens."

It was her turn to raise an eyebrow. "You sound like you don't have a very high opinion of your contemporaries."

"On the contrary, I find the crew of the _Enterprise_ to be exemplary in the performance of their duties and a credit to their uniforms," he said as they joined the line for the next available lift.

"But?" she prodded.

"They are often irrational. The captain, for instance, has frequently indulged in reckless and ill-advised behavior."

"Dr. McCoy did mention something about jumping off a cliff. Still, he's the captain when he should still be chasing girls, so he must be doing something right," she pointed out as the line moved forward. "You're still here, any road."

The line surged again. "A fact attributable as much to luck as to the captain's decisions," he said.

"That's reassuring." She followed him into the turbolift and smashed herself against the rear wall, so close she could kiss the metal if she but puckered her lips.

Spock, unruffled by the crush of bodies, blinked down at her. "Perhaps if you were to turn parallel to the wall instead," he suggested.

"Wouldn't I take up more space that way?"

"The amount of space you would occupy would be equal regardless of the position you assumed," he informed her. "A parallel position would offer you greater comfort."

"I'll keep that in mind," she answered. "I think it's a bit late to do anything about it now." Someone rested a padd on top of her head for an instant before abruptly removing it.

"I'm sorry," said a mortified female voice above her head. "I didn't see you there."

"It's all right. You're not the first to make that mistake." _And you probably won't be the last, either._ she added ruefully.

The turbolift disgorged its contents onto the deck. "Starfleet regulations do not forbid the formation of interpersonal relationships, including those of a romantic nature," Spock said as he stepped out of the turbolift.

She blinked at the non sequitur. "That's good to know, I suppose, though I wasn't planning on going man-hunting."

_You sure as hell'd take a poke at Dr. McCoy if you thought you had a shot at it,_ her brother leered, and in her mind's eye, she saw the doctor striding down the corridor in that silver wetsuit, the material clinging to all his God-given places.

_It was even worse on the way back,_ she recalled as Spock set off down the corridor. _I liked to have died watching him walk back to sickbay in that wet suit, water dripping from the ends of his hair._ She smothered a wistful sigh and shifted against a sudden attack of the vapors. She ducked her head to conceal the blush she felt rising in her cheeks.

Spock took no notice of her sudden discomfiture. He simply strode on. He finally stopped at a door designated as E-241 by a small plaque mounted on the wall beside it. "Dr. No'dagha is inside," he said without preamble. "He will conduct your interview."

"Another doctor?"

"He holds a PhD in Social Work," he explained. "Hence, the title of Doctor."

She relaxed. "Thank heavens."

"Once your interview is completed, you will be free to explore the starbase. Are you familiar with the mapping system?"

"I can't say that I am. "Until now, I haven't been anywhere but sickbay and the hydrotherapy room on the ship."

"You can determine your location and the location of your desired destination with your padd or by accessing any of the computer panels you see on the walls." He gestured down the corridor with an elegant stretch of one long finger, a flight attendant pointing out the emergency exits during the safety lecture, and she fought the impolitic and childish impulse to snigger.

"Thank you, Mr. Spock."

A single, curt nod. "Human custom dictates that I wish you luck, but I do not believe it will be necessary." He gestured for her to pass through the waiting doors, and then he turned on his heel and left her where she sat.

She watched until his blue tunic was out of sight, and then she turned and surveyed the door with trepidation, fingers opening and closing restlessly on the handrims of her chair. The door gave no indication of what waited behind it.

_I don't want to go in there,_ she thought, and her thigh twitched and bunched with the temptation to turn tail and flee to the familiarity of the _Enterprise's_ sickbay, with its crepe-soled feet and antiseptic smell and implements of well-intended torture.

_If you don't go in there, then Dr. Boswell wins,_ her grandmother noted. _You could spend another cozy night on the_ Enterprise, _but come tomorrow morning, Dr. McCoy wouldn't be able to do anything but watch as you were hauled off to where fragile things go to die in a hail of needles and experimental drugs. Besides, Dr. McCoy is doing his damnedest to help you, and it would be a shame to let all that effort be for nothing._

She thought of her childhood and the endless parade of therapists and social workers who had disrupted her playtime with interminable sessions of holding oversized pencils and blocks and looking at flashcards of dogs and cats and smiling policemen until the images burned themselves into her retinas and insinuated themselves into her lollipop dreams. There had been so many of them, most kind and competent, a few cold and indifferent to the child mired in the wrack of her body and desperate to do anything but sing for her supper like a starving minstrel on the mud-clotted edges of the market square, and each of them had torn from her a fragment of time that could never be recovered, crushed a dream that might have been beneath the weight of paper and ink and manila folders choked with observations and records seldom read and eventually gone to oblivion in a cloud of radioactive dust.

_If I had known the way things were going to turn out, I would've spent a hell of a lot less time in therapy rooms and a whole lot more digging in the dirt in the backyard,_ she thought dourly. _All the peg-cramming and leg-lifting I did didn't amount to a hill of beans in the end. It didn't keep me out of that tin can, and it damn sure didn't help me land Prince Charming._

_It got you here, didn't it? Sitting in that spiffy chair and doing it straighter than you've ever been,_ Grandmama said stoutly. _And even if the first part of your life didn't turn out the way you thought it would and was interrupted by idiot parents who couldn't see the gift God gave them, well, now you've got a second to get it right. Part of that means finding your gumption and seeing what's behind this door. It's not fair, but it's the way it is. It might be bad, just the most godawful mess of stupidity and ignorant foolishness you ever did see, or it might be something wonderful. Thing is, darlin', you won't get anywhere just sitting here._

She brushed the sleeve of her blouse and tucked a strand of her behind her ear. _Here goes nothing,_ she thought, and rolled through the door.

The room, as it turned out, was furnished in Futuristic Therapist, with staid, grey walls decorated with holographic diplomas and certificates of appreciation and stark, utilitarian furniture. A couch butted the far wall, its upholstery like elephant hide, and to the left stood a desk, bare save for a padd placed on the blotter in the center and a coffee mug full of styluses. A holograph sat on the far edge. In front of the desk were two chairs of clamshell white, armless and deep-seated and wholly uninviting.

The man behind the desk rose and approached, hand extended. "Miss Walker?"

"Yes, sir, I am," she admitted, and willed her expression not to betray her surprise.

Dr. No'dagha wasn't human. His head was utterly hairless and twice the size of a man's, and the eyes, too, were enormous, a vivid, cerulean blue inside his dark brown face. The hand he offered her sported three long fingers and a thumb.

_Closer to E.T. than the little, grey men,_ she mused idiotically as she accepted his hand. Leather against her palm, but his grip was gentle.

"Please, sit," he said graciously, and hurried to remove one of the chairs in front of his desk. He pulled the chair away and gestured for her to occupy the space that remained.

She dutifully slotted herself into the space and set her brakes, and then she rested her hands on her lap and resisted the impulse to twist the fabric of her skirt between her fingers.

_Cool as a cucumber, my little rose,_ her grandmother urged, and she sat as straight as she could and curled her fingers around her knees.

Dr. No'dagha returned to his seat behind the desk, smoothing his grey tunic as he sat. "How are you today?" he asked, and reached for his padd.

"I'm fine. Bit nervous, I suppose. And yourself?"

"Fine, thank you," he answered. His voice was a smooth baritone, leather and oiled mahogany, and it carried an inexplicable hint of New Orleans patois. "And there's no reason to be nervous. This is just an interview to confirm what the DNA tests Dr. McCoy supplied told us, and to begin to get you acclimated to your new circumstances." He tapped the screen of his padd and sat it on the desk in front of him. "It must've been quite a shock to you."

"Yes, sir. I thought they were pulling my leg until they opened the observation window and showed me all the stars."

"'Pulling my leg,'" Dr. No'dagha repeated, mystified, and his hairless eyebrow ridge furrowed in confusion.

"Oh. It's an old expression, I guess. Means I thought it was a joke."

His expression cleared. "Ah. A reasonable reaction were I in your position," he said. "Though it would've been a formidable joke, indeed."

"I suppose it would," she agreed.

He offered her a small smile and sat forward in his chair. "Full name?" Brisk now, and she thought of university registrars and harried county clerks.

_To business, then._ "Rosalie Evangeline Walker."

Fingers glided over the padd, rain against the window. "Date of birth?"

"March 22, 1990."

Nimble fingers tripped over the improbable date, but only for an instant. "Place of birth?"

"Emory University Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia."

"Mother's name?"

"Sherrilyn Walker."

"Father's name?"

"George Walker."

"Any siblings?"

"One. A brother named Daniel. Younger, he was."

_Not anymore, he ain't,_ piped up a vicious, wounded voice inside her head. _Treacherous little shit's two hundred years in the ground, and God willing, he's so much dust in his coffin._

"You attended college, is that correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"What did you study?"

"History. My degree's pretty much good for nothing now, though."

He looked up from his padd. "History might've gone on in your absence, Miss Walker, but the skills, ambition, and intelligence you used to attain it are still very much in demand. Have you thought about resuming your studies?"

"Certainly. But like I told Dr. McCoy, I'd have to find someplace I could get into first. Now that modern medicine has got most people like me all fixed up, there doesn't seem to be anywhere for me to go."

"So Dr. McCoy has discussed your options with you?" Casual, but she sensed a sudden shrewdness.

_Careful now, Rosalie,_ Grandmama cautioned. _It might be nothing, but it might be a whole lot of something, too. A careless word could come back to bite you in the behind._

"He mentioned I had a knack for learning after he gave me a battery of tests. Said he figured there'd be plenty of schools willing to take me if that's what I wanted once I finished with my rehab program."

"He's not wrong there." Dr. No'dagha thumbed through several screens on his padd. "He sent over your test results, and I must say, I'm deeply impressed. Conventional wisdom holds that individuals with your...difficulties are mentally impaired."

"Does it now?" she said, piqued. _Well, I know just where they can stow that wisdom._

"Did you have a specific school in mind?"

She scoffed. "No. I figured I needed to get all this sorted first.' She gestured vaguely at her chair. "Dr. McCoy says there's distance learning I could do if I wanted."

"You seem to talk to Dr. McCoy a great deal," No'dagha observed. He pushed his padd aside and steepled his fingers, elbows propped on the desk.

She shrugged. "He was the first person I saw when I woke up. He's the one who planned my rehab and supervised my first few sessions. Plus, sickbay is the only accessible area of the ship right now, so I spend most of my time there."

He considered that. "The rest of the ship isn't accessible?"

"I can roll through it just fine, I suppose, and the doors are plenty wide, but the only toilet with handrails is in sickbay. Dr. McCoy talked about setting up quarters for me once I got a little stronger."

"Has he discussed your treatment options?"

She nodded. "It was one of the first things he did once he got some food in me."

"And what did he say?" The patois was soft as ever, but those blue eyes were sharp inside his face.

"He said there were surgeries he could do, and things he could try, but that he couldn't cure me. He could make it easier and treat the pain and make me comfortable and functional as possible."

"And has he?"

"Yes." Emphatic and without hesitation.

He raised an eyebrow at that.

"What?"

"You seem quite certain."

"If you'd seen me before he started, you wouldn't need to ask why," she retorted.

"Has he discussed Dr. Boswell with you?"

_That's not the question you're really asking, is it?_ she thought shrewdly, and her fingers tightened on her knees. _What you're really asking is if he's tried to poison me against her. Well, I hate to break it to you, but she's done a mighty fine job of that all by her lonesome._

"He told me her name, and that she was preeminent in her field," she said.

"Once again, he is correct. Dr. Boswell is a rising star in her field. You'll be in fine hands."

_So it's a foregone conclusion then,_ she thought with rising alarm, and she tightened her grip on her knees until her close-cropped nails dug into the skin.

"Maybe so," she replied, and fought to keep her voice steady. "And I appreciate her taking the time to see me, but I won't know if she's the doctor for me until we meet."

"You haven't decided to become her patient, then?" he asked, surprised.

"I find it's a bad idea to make a decision before you have all the facts in front of you," she answered, all wide-eyed innocence. Beneath her fingers, her knees prickled and stung.

"That's true," he admitted. "Though be mindful that it is an incredible opportunity. Dr. Boswell doesn't accept many patients."

_That's probably because they're all down in the basement, strapped to tables and chained in cages like zoo animals,_ she thought darkly, but her mouth knew better and said only, "And I'm grateful. Tomorrow will tell. Not many folks get a second chance at life, and I'd be a fool not to make the most of mine."

"True wisdom, Miss Walker," he said, and picked up his padd again.

On and on the interview went, and by the time she emerged nearly an hour later, she was battered and spent and on edge, a rabbit barely escaped from the circling shadow of a hawk. When the doors slid closed in her wake, she rolled a few paces to the left and sagged against the wall, the hull hard against her shoulder.

_I feel like the only same person in a madhouse._ Her muscles ached from the morning's constant tension, and nausea rolled in her empty stomach. She was starving, jittery from lack of food, but her belly was a greasy, miserable cramp of unease and excess adrenaline, and it would likely refuse anything she offered it. She could sleep at least if she could find her temporary quarters. The computer and its map, she supposed.

She rolled to the nearest computer station. "Computer, locate temporary quarters for Rosalie Walker."

"Temporary quarters for Rosalie Walker are pending. They are located on Deck 23, Room 061," it informed her with robotic cheer.

"Pending. Fantastic."

Back to the ship it was, then. It took her half an hour to reach its dock, twenty of which were spent waiting for an available turbolift that wasn't crammed to capacity. By the time she reached it, she was exhausted, out of sorts, and near tears. She rolled on board and made a beeline for the drab familiarity of sickbay. It was deserted when she rolled in, quiet as a tomb with no rolling carts or shuffling feet, and she found herself wishing for even a white-scrubbed yeoman for company.

Her padd was on the tray where she'd so foolishly left it, and she wasted no time in logging in and checking her messages. Precious few, given that she had no friends or family. In fact, all of them were from Dr. No'dagha. Informational packets, mostly, about the starbase and coping with integration into Federation society. Links to resources on education and counseling services. And at the bottom of the list one entitled simply _Welcome to the United Federation of Planets, Miss Walker. ID#042-997-92-77-4578_

She opened it and scanned the contents. Effective immediately, she was granted the status of Federation citizen and granted all the rights thereof. Please retain a copy of this for your records and transfer it to all personal com devices. She whooped in relief and promptly sent copies to the captain and Dr. McCoy. She'd scarcely lowered the padd to her lap when it chimed with an incoming message.

_Where are you?_ Dr. McCoy, direct as ever.

_The ship. My temporary quarters are pending. I didn't know where else to go._

_Stay there. I'm on my way._

He appeared less than five minutes later, padd in one hand and bioscanner at the ready in the other. "You all right?" he asked, and waved the bioscanner over her head, a priest offering benediction.

"Tired," she admitted. "And I've got a headache."

"That might be because your blood-sugar levels are in the tank," he fumed. "Have you eaten?"

"I choked down half a piece of dry toast at breakfast. I was too nervous to eat much else."

"You're going to make yourself sick, dammit," he chided. He dropped his bioscanner onto a nearby tray and stalked to the replicator. "You're dehydrated, too."

"I was afraid my nerves would make me wet myself," she confessed.

The rigid line of his spine relaxed a fraction. "Well, you've crossed that hurdle. You need to drink and eat. What's your pleasure?" He stood in front of the replicator, finger poised over the keypad.

"Doctor's discretion," she mumbled, and buried her head in her hands.

The next time she looked up, it was to the sound of a tray clattering to the tray table beside her. "Eat," Dr. McCoy ordered. "And I mean all of it." He rounded her chair and grabbed the push handles, and then he maneuvered her in front of the tray table.

He had decided on a glass of water, a bowl of chicken and rice soup, a biscuit with butter and blackberry jam, a baked chicken breast, steamed carrots in a honey glaze, and mashed potatoes. She eyed the spread in dismay. "I can't eat all this," she groaned. 

"You can, and you will," he retorted. "And I'm going to sit here until you do." He marched to his desk and sat in his chair with an air of ruffled indignation. He glowered as though daring her to say a word about it.

She giggled drunkenly at him. "Lord have mercy," she murmured fondly, and shook her head as she picked up her spoon and dipped it into the bowl of soup.

She felt the gentle weight of his scrutiny against her scalp and listened to the industrious clitter of a stylus over a screen. "If the headache hasn't subsided by the time you're done eating, I'll give you something for it," he said quietly.

"It's easing off already," she told him, and took a bite of mashed potatoes. Lightly buttered with a hint of garlic. The doctor was a man of impeccable culinary taste. She sighed in appreciation.

"Figured it would," he said, and she didn't miss the hint of pride in his tone, subtle as the garlic on her tongue.

She ate in silence. The tension ebbed from her body by slow degrees, a breath released. She ached with its loss. Because she'd been awoken earlier than normal, she couldn't be given her dose of Loxtan for fear of overdose, and her muscles were well aware of its absence. She winced at a hard knot in her shoulder and reached up to rub it with stiff fingers.

"You hurting?" Sharp.

"Some. I never got my Loxtan today." She took a bite of biscuit and coaxed her shoulder into an ungainly roll.

"Hell. This fiasco has made a mess of everyone's schedule."

"Sorry about that, Doctor."

He snorted. "Don't be so eager to take on the sins of the world, Miss Walker. Most folks got enough of their own to worry about." He rose and crossed to the bank of drawers where various medications were kept under lock and key. "If anyone's to blame for this mess, it's Dr. Boswell." He keyed in his authorization code and yanked open a drawer.

"All the same, I'm sorry for all the trouble this has put everybody to."

"That's another thing you need to quit doing," he said as he rummaged through the drawer and withdrew an ampoule. "You're not a damn problem to be dealt with. You're a human being who needs help. And you aren't the center of the universe, either. This didn't happen because of you; it happened because of bureaucracy, plain and simple. It's just as much a pain in the ass now as it was in your day."

"Oh, honey, I doubt that," she said, and used her knife to spread the jam on her biscuit. "Your patients ever have to wait nine weeks for essential medical equipment because some pinhead at the insurance company isn't sure the ability to breathe is medically necessary?"

"I can't say I have, no," he admitted. He inserted the ampoule into a hypo and clicked it shut. "My point is that that's one monstrosity we haven't managed to abolish." He approached her with hypo at the ready.

"This biscuit is a disgrace," she told him, and took another bite.

"Like one of those canned abominations they call 'homestyle'," he agreed. "But it's the best we've got. You can't teach home cooking to a machine." He pressed the hypo to the side of her neck. "This is another muscle relaxant called Detrazan. It's far less potent than the Loxtan and probably won't do much more than take the edge off your pain, but it also has a much shorter dosage window. It'll likely wear off while you're sleeping tonight, which means I can get you back on the Loxtan in the morning. Do I have your permission to administer it?"

She stared at him, blackberry jam sweet on her tongue. "Of course you do. Why would you even need to ask?"

"You were in obvious distress when I gave you the Loxtan the first time. You're not now, and since this isn't a life-threatening situation, you have the right to refuse."

_Bless you, Dr. McCoy,_ she thought. _I know damn well you don't need my permission for this. You're just doing it because you can, and because you'll be damned if you'll be like Boswell._

"Well, I'm not an idiot, so you go on and do what you need to do." She closed her eyes against the sting of grateful tears.

The hypo delivered its dose with a slow hiss. "Like I said, it should take the edge off. If you still feel like hell in an hour, I can give you a drop or two more."

"I've lived with out it for thirty years. I can live without it for another day."

"Yeah, well, you shouldn't have to," he groused, and tossed the hypo onto his desk. He ran his hand through his hair and leaned a hip against the edge of his desk. He crossed his arms and watched her eat. "For someone who wasn't sure they could eat all that, you're sure putting a hurting on it."

"Guess it's easier to eat when you don't feel like you're begging for your life."

His eyes darkened.

"That No'dagha fellow was nice enough, but he was doing quite the sell job for the greatness of Doctor Boswell. Made it sound like I'd received an invitation from the President."

"Did you commit to anything?"

"Like hell." She took several swallows of water. "I told him I wasn't making any decisions until I met the woman for myself."

He gave a curt nod of approval. "Your appointment is at 0800, by the way." 

"Of course it is." She polished off the biscuit and washed it down with more water. "I guess that's another day lost?"

"Mmm. Unless you're feeling up to it." He was quiet for a moment. "We'll get back on track as soon as we get out of here. Unless you decide to stay. You can, you know, if that's what you decide.

"Dr. McCoy, have you lost your mind?" she asked, flabbergasted. "What in the world makes you think I'd want to stay here?"

He shrugged. "She might be an awful human being," he said, "but some of the worst human beings make the biggest breakthroughs. Maybe she can do for you what I can't."

She dropped her spoon into her potatoes with a thick plop. "You have got to be joking. Why would I want to cast my lot with some terrifying ideologue who thinks I'm a monkey with pretensions in need of correction? She's a eugenicist, for God's sake." She took a bite of carrots. "No. I've had my fill of rough handling. Maybe you can't make me walk; maybe I was never meant to. All I know is that you're the first doctor who's given me a choice. You haven't lied to me, haven't hurt me when you didn't have to, and you're the first person since my memaw to make me feel like a human being."

The doctor ducked his head and turned to study the shuttered observation window.

"I'd be a fool to throw that away for a chance at something the good Lord never meant for me to have, and for all her faults, Mama never raised a fool." Another carrot, another bite of potato. "Besides, you're the only piece of home I've got left."

The doctor shuffled and cleared his throat. His Adam's apple bobbed. He straightened and went back to the replicator.

"I hope that's for you, because I couldn't eat another thing," she said, and heaved a satisfied sigh.

He made no reply, but when he returned a moment later, he bore an enormous slice of peach pie topped with whipped cream and a scoop of pecan ice cream. He was also, she noted, carrying a second spoon.

"Not even for some peach pie?" He pushed her empty tray aside and set the dessert in the center.

"Doctor, you're going to kill me," she moaned.

"Well, at least you won't have to go to that damned appointment in the morning," he answered slyly, and pulled up a stool to settle opposite her.

She guffawed. "I like the way you think." She eyed the pie. "I could think of worse ways to go," she mused, and picked up her fork.

"And I've seen 'em," he said.

She plunged her fork into the crust at the tip of the slice and took a bite. "Whoever calibrated this replicator needs a whipping," she declared. "I don't think they've tasted a Georgia peach in their lives."

The doctor laughed. Not a brief guffaw, but true laughter, low and steady in his chest and soft as it spilled from his lips. Sensual as a sip of Kentucky whiskey and bright as summer sunshine, and the fist in the center of her chest unclenched. It was lovely. It reached his eyes and softened his face, and she couldn't help but stare as he rested his forehead on the back of one hand. His shoulders shook, and the spoon jiggled in his grasp, shallow bowl pointed downward like the fork of a dowsing rod.

His laughter was infectious, and soon she was laughing, too, soft, staccato chuffs that rattled her whole frame. She dropped the spoon and wheezed, tears streaming down her face.

"Oh," the doctor said when the laughter at last began to subside. He wiped his watery eyes with the heel of his palm.

She hiccoughed softly and sat back in her chair.

_You need to do that more often,_ she thought as she watched the doctor straighten on his stool. _It makes you beautiful._

And he was beautiful, boyish and young and tall as a young maple tree. The laughter erased years of care from around his mouth and eyes, and just before the mantle of doctor settled over him again, she saw the fresh-faced country boy he must've been, mucking stalls and calving heifers and sucking a blade of grass between his teeth.

"What?" he asked, and he was the wary, waspish doctor again.

She hid her smile behind a spoonful of mediocre pie. "Nothing, Doctor," she said, and her mouth filled with the taste of peaches.


	10. Bitter Pill

There was nothing so sweet as a peach in Leonard McCoy's mouth the next morning as he accompanied Miss Walker to her appointment with the illustrious Dr. Boswell. It tasted of too much coffee and the antacid he'd been swigging all morning in a fit of nervous anticipation. His stomach was an apprehensive knot beneath his skin, and his eyes were dry from sleeplessness. He'd been up half the night reviewing his case file, and every time he'd tried to sleep, he'd dreamed of granite-faced orderlies marching into sickbay to carry off a screaming Rosalie, whose arms and legs snapped like dry kindling in their indifferent, iron grips.

_You should've let me die,_ she'd said sadly as her splintered forearm had jutted grotesquely through the torn skin of her arm, and blood had pattered to the floor in a grisly trail to the door. _You should've left me in that cryotube. I would have been asleep. Now I'm going to feel it. I'm going to feel everything._

In the end, he'd given up on sleep and trudged to sickbay, where he'd rifled aimlessly through the shelves and eyed his various experiments without enthusiasm. Mostly, he'd held vigil over Rosalie, who'd huddled beneath the blanket in a painfully-tight ball. Now and then, she'd whimpered in her sleep, and his hands had itched to smooth her limbs until they uncurled and her breathing lost that worrisome, ragged edge that spoke of nightmares behind her twitching eyelids, but he'd kept his hands to himself and settled for sitting on a stool at the foot of her bed and catching up on correspondence. Letters from his mother and brother. Invitations to various conferences, most of which he'd had to refuse. Journals and articles from medical associations, a convivial note from an old neuroscience professor at UMiss.

She'd woken once, had moaned softly and shifted beneath the coverlet, limbs shivering spasmodically with the feeble effort, and then then she'd opened her eyes and looked at him. Her lips had twitched in a sleepy smile, and she'd been so small and vulnerable that his heart had ached.

_It's going to be all right,_ he'd wanted to tell her, but he hadn't known any such thing, hadn't wanted to make a liar of himself at the eleventh hour, so he'd simply given a curt nod and a gruff order to go on back to sleep now. That small, sleepy smile had brightened for an instant, a filament on the flashpoint of failure, and then she'd rolled over and closed her eyes, fingers fisted in the sheets and face buried in the pillow.

Frankly, she looked no better this morning. In fact, she looked diminished, hunched and shrunken in her her chair as she rolled along with jerky, graceless movements. Her shoulders strained against the harness.

_Hardly a ringing endorsement of my care,_ he thought morosely.

"Sit up," he said for the third time. "You're straining in the harness."

She immediately straightened. "Sorry, Doctor. "Everything tenses when I'm nervous, and right now, I'm scared to death." Her voice shook. "Besides, I didn't get much sleep last night."

_That makes two of us._

A sympathetic grunt. "Try to relax. It's just a preliminary exam, and now that you've got your Federation ID, you can refuse treatment."

She stopped, tucked against the far wall to let pedestrian traffic pass. "Then why can't I just refuse right now? I don't want to do this. I don't want a new doctor when I've got an excellent one right now." She looked at him, obdurate and terrified, and he didn't need a bioscanner to see that her stress levels, which had begun to climb the minute she'd gotten out of bed this morning, were now in the stratosphere. She was pale as milk and stiff as a board, and she was trembling, a subtle vibration in her hands and feet.

_Nothing should have to live under this much stress,_ he thought as he watched her in helpless silence. _It's a wonder she hasn't collapsed. If you did this to an animal, they'd call it cruelty, but do it to a human being, and it's suddenly bureaucratic necessity._

"If it were up to me, I wouldn't make you. I'd turn you around and take you right back to the ship," he said. "I still can if you want me to, but if I do that, they're likely to think I'm trying to hide you or am coercing you into staying. You get through this dog-and pony show and still refuse, they can't say mum about it."

She nodded. "Guess we'd better get on, then," she said, and ground into reluctant motion again, and she was so miserable and defeated that he wanted to weep as he led her onward, a driver prodding a broken horse to the slaughterhouse.

He stopped in front of the door. The trembling was readily apparent now, a steady thrum that made her heels drum on the footplates. She looked at him, eyes too big and lips too white. _Are you going to make me do this?_ A mute plea for mercy that he could not grant.

_I'm so sorry, sweetheart._ "You ready?"

"No." So soft and mournful that he almost relented, consequences be damned, but then she forced her shoulders back and rolled through the door with her head held high, and he could only follow.

_You're a bastard, Leonard McCoy,_ he thought as he entered the sickbay. Its layout was close to that of the _Enterprise_ , with rows of biobeds separated by a corridor and doors that led to surgical suites and the intensive-care unit. The beds were periodically interpersed with supply closets and scrub rooms and medicine lockers, and the CMO's desk and observation area were twice as large as his own.

_Nice setup,_ he mused, and the doctor in him catalogued the array of state-of-the-art equipment.

A prim, unsmiling woman rose from the behind the desk and approached with regal, martial gravitas. "Dr. McCoy." It wasn't a question. 

"Yes, ma'am, I am," he answered with the politeness of long-ingrained habit.

"Dr. Moira Boswell." She extended a pale, thin hand, unadorned by either jewelry or nail polish. "And this is the patient?" she asked, as though Rosalie were a mildly-interesting slide preparation and not looking right at her with a game smile on her face.

"This is Miss Rosalie Walker, yes," he said, and shook her hand. A muscle in his jaw twitched.

"Hello, ma'am. It's a pleasure to meet you," Rosalie said, and offered her own hand.

Boswell blinked, nonplussed, and accepted her hand. She gave it a single hurried pump and released it as though it were a particularly noisome appendage. "Likewise," she muttered unconvincingly, and stepped back. She gestured to the biobed nearest her desk. "Put her over there," she commanded as though Rosalie were a new piece of equipment, and strode to the nearest supply closet.

Rosalie turned and spared him a searching glance, and then she rolled forward and parked her chair parallel to the biobed. There was no handrail, and the bed was too high for her to boost herself up. She set her brakes and folded her hands in her lap. She swung out her footplates, and he stepped forward to help her stand, but before he could, Dr. Boswell asked, "What are you doing, Doctor McCoy?"

"Her bones and muscles are too weak to start strength and transfer training, and your bed is too high, so I'm doing an assisted transfer," he explained.

"I'd prefer you didn't." Clipped and imperious. She nodded to two nearby orderlies, who swept in and shouldered him aside. Neither spoke or offered instructions to Rosalie. They simply seized her at ankles and armpits and manhauled her onto the bed. Her blouse rode up to expose her midriff, and she tensed against their indifferent grip.

"And I'd prefer your orderlies didn't manhandle my patient," he shot back. "Her bone density is improving rapidly, but she's still not used to contact and bruises easily.

The orderlies stepped back, and Rosalie teetered precariously on the edge of the bed, feet splayed and hands scrabbling for purchase at its narrow edge. He hurried forward and put out a hand to steady her, front knee in a deep bend and rear leg in a long stretch, a fencer in an impossible lunge. He waited until he felt her settle, and then he released his hold and retreated.

"Poor balance," Boswell remarked. "Is her coordination equally poor?" Boswell peered at her with clinical interest, a padd in one hand and a bioscanner in the other.

"It is. I'm hoping it will improve once her strength does. Her trunk control has shown some improvement."

"Minimal," Boswell murmured dismissively. She stood in front of Rosalie and waved the bioscanner over her.

"Any improvement is good in my book." _Besides, it's only been a few weeks._

"Mmm," was Boswell's only reply as she consulted the bioscanner readings. "She's showing abnormally high cortisol readings," she said.

_That's because she's afraid, which you'd know if you bothered to look at her,_ he seethed. "This is a stressful situation for her," he pointed out.

"Perhaps it would be less stressful if you waited outside until I've finished my examination," she suggested. She dropped the bioscanner and picked up a penlight.

_If I leave, then who're you going to talk to?_ he thought furiously. _It sure as hell isn't her._

"No," Rosalie snapped, so sudden, sharp, and unlike her customary quiet murmur that he flinched. "Dr. McCoy stays here."

Dr. Boswell ignored her. "Please, Doctor, I work best without interference."

"And I said no," Rosalie repeated. "He stays here. The Federation's code of patient's rights states that patients not incapacitated or otherwise in need of urgent, life-saving treatment may request that their primary physician accompany them to all specialist appointments. Dr. McCoy is my primary physician. I want him here."

He wasn't sure who was more surprised, him or Dr. Boswell, who surveyed Rosalie with cold scrutiny.

_I'll be damned,_ he thought in amazement. _She's got some piss in her vinegar, after all._ He was absurdly pleased at this development, and bounced from heel to toe and back again. Then, as he looked at Dr. Boswell, _She's not as dumb as you thought she was, is she, Doctor?_

"He stays," Rosalie insisted. "If not, I'm throwing myself off this table and crawling out of here." She clutched the edge of the biobed in a white-knuckled grip and glared at Dr. Boswell in mute, mulish challenge.

"You can stay," Dr. Boswell said as though she were conferring a great favor and not adhering to Federation rules. She raised Rosalie's eyelid with brusque jerk of her thumb and shone the light into her eye. She repeated the action with the other eye. "Follow my pen with your eyes only, she ordered.

Rosalie obeyed.

Dr. Boswell switched off the penlight and set it aside. Then she seized Rosalie's hand and rolled it left to right to check the rotation of her wrist. It balked at being rolled to the right, and Rosalie grimaced.

Dr. Boswell dropped her hand and made a note in her padd. "Not much range of motion."

"It's limited," he agreed. "Some of it's spasticity and contracture, but scans showed warping of the trapezium and pisiform carpals in each hand.

"Possibly due to positional habituation. I'm guessing she doesn't move much."

"I've got her doing ninety minutes of PT a day. As to what she was doing two hundred and forty years ago, I couldn't say. I wasn't exactly around to observe," he said drily. "How about you ask her? Her mouth works pretty well."

"I want your medical opinion, Doctor. I have no interest in unreliable information from a patient."

"'Unreliable information from a patient?'" he repeated incredulously, and narrowed his eyes at her. "My God, man, haven't you ever heard of a case history?"

"Which are notoriously unreliable, as you know, particularly when taken from patients of dubious mental capacity. Besides, you've already provided a thorough case history. To take another would be a waste of time." She pushed Rosalie's hand back until she cringed and made another note on her padd.

"'Dubious mental capacity?'" He felt like a broken record. "Have you even read my damn report? If you had, you'd know there was nothing wrong with her mind."

"Tests are helpful for baselines, but they can be deceptive. She might not function well in practical tests. Have you attempted to test her practical skills?"

"You mean like talking?" he suggested, and sarcasm lined his tongue like sour cream. "She passed that one with flying colors. She does pretty well with eating and drinking and thinking and feeling, and if you'd bothered to look at a damn thing I sent you, you'd know she possesses exceptional critical-thinking and problem-solving skills and one hell of a lot of self-awareness. You know, the things you need to be considered a human being. You'd do well to treat her like one and be a credit to your profession."

"I sense a great deal of emotional involvement here, Dr. McCoy," she said coolly, and her thin lips curved in a smile that did not reach her eyes. "And you're hardly one to talk about being a credit to your profession." 

_Please, son. Please._ "What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded.

Another humorless smile. Her eyes were hard inside her face. "Please, Doctor. Your exploits with Captain Kirk are infamous. Sneaking him aboard the _Enterprise_ , helping him break the Prime Directive on Nibiru, violating medical ethics by injecting him with an untested serum created from blood you obtained without consent. The only reason you're still here is because Kirk's reckless heroism saved the planet. If not, you'd be treated plague victims on Rudaras-12 and squeegeing rotting flesh into the biohazard drains."

The relief was so acute that he laughed, a sharp, angry caw. "You act like saving lives is beneath you," he said, and contempt burned in his belly like an ulcer. "And if I hadn't synthesized that serum and raised Jim Kirk from the dead, the earth would be so much dust in the cosmos, so you can spare me the self-righteousness."

"And emotional involvement?" he went on. "If by not treating her like a Rhesus monkey with a bad case of hubris, then yes, I am emotionally involved. Dammit, she's a person in need of help, not another opportunity for your extensive resume. You might be an expert on bioprostheses, but from where I'm standing, you don't know or or give a single damn about the people attached to them, and that's a sorry state of affairs for a doctor. A doctor without give a damn isn't a doctor at all, That's a goddamn scientist."

"A rousing speech, Doctor," she said, and the condescension in her voice was smooth as glass. "Doctor or scientist, what I am is successful, and I can guarantee you I will do more for her than you ever could."

He wanted to protest, to claim that the healing in his hands was no less than hers, that Rosalie was, in fact, blossoming under his patient, meticulous care rendered by gentle patient hands, but he knew that it would do no good and only bolster her claims of emotional overinvestment, and so he held his tongue.

She flashed him a triumphant, Cheshire-cat grin so smug he could practically _see_ the feathers floating from the corners of her mouth and spun away from him to seize Rosalie's left foot. 

She stripped it of shoe, AFO, and sock with practiced efficiency. It was bare and pathetic in her palm, archless as an infant's. The toes fanned and curled with nervous energy as Dr. Boswell surveyed them with a critical eye. "The circulation's adequate. No arch, and the bones feel exceedingly fine." She squeezed Rosalie's foot, and Rosalie keened and flinched. "This is after bone density treatments?"

_Dammit, stop hurting her._ "Yes."

She turned and picked up a tiny, thin-gauge needle, and then she jabbed into into the sole of Rosalie's foot without warning.

"Dr. McCoy!" Rosalie yelped.

_Goddammit, you merciless asshole,_ he thought furiously, and clasped his hands behind his back to keep them from reaching for her. "It's just a reflex test. It's all right." 

"A reflex test?" Shrill and disbelieving. "But you never-" A yelp as the indignity was repeated on the opposite foot. "Dr. McCoy," she pleaded, and the betrayal in it scored his heart.

"It's all right. It's just a few tests, and then it's done," and oh, God, he hated himself because she was helpless and cornered and in the clutches of an amoral jackass, but Boswell was right; if Starfleet suspected him of emotional overinvestment, they could wrest her from him despite all the patient rights in the world.

_Just hang on, sweetheart,_ he prayed as he gazed at him in wordless entreaty. _An hour of this, and it will be all over. You'll never have to see her again if you don't want to._

_Bet you're not the first person to ask that trade of her,_ noted his agonized conscience. _By the looks of her, they've asked it plenty. And she's given it, whether she wanted to or not._

_Dr. McCoy,_ her eyes said, wet and wretched, and he did nothing.

Her chest hitched once, twice, and he was convinced she was on the brink of another crushing meltdown, but she simply stilled and swallowed. The light drained from her eyes, and she simply sat like a broken doll, blank gaze fixed on a point over Boswell's shoulder.

_So much for her honest doctor and little piece of home,_ he thought bleakly, and dug his fingers into his wrist in an act of penance. _I'm sorry I let you down, sweetheart._

Rosalie offered neither resistance nor protest as Dr. Boswell's expert hands pulled and tugged and twisted. She cried out when she tested her heel cords and shoved her bony knees chinward, but she was all out of pleas and the hope to make them. When Dr. Boswell shoved her backward and arranged her on the bed like an anatomist's dummy, she submitted without even a cry, simply lay on the bed and endured, face inscrutable.

"Good God, you're going to pop her ACL you keep wrenching like that," he protested after a particularly rough bend.

"I have tissue regenerators," was all Dr. Boswell said as she scribbled on her padd. 

Rosalie blinked at him, dazed and lethargic, and then she turned her face to the wall in final surrender.

Horses pawing at dirty straw. The brief trill of a phaser and his father carrying a worn bridle to the truck.

_C'mon, sweetheart, don't quit on me._

_Why not? You quit on her._ His jaw ached.

"Get her up," Dr. Boswell barked to the two orderlies who had been hovering nearby, and they dutifully hauled her upright. Rosalie blinked at the floor, fingers curled around the edge of the bed.

"I'm going to get a blood sample."

"No." It was the first word Rosalie had said since his spectacular fall from grace.

"As an unregistered alien, you have no discretion in medical matters and must submit to any tests or examinations that I deem necessary," Boswell said, and reached for a syringe.

"As of this morning, I am a Federation citizen and am within my rights to refuse any procedure."

That brought Dr. Boswell up short. She frowned and picked up her padd and scanned Rosalie's file. "I see," she said, and he detected a distinct note of chapped ass that pleased him to no end. "Let me get you a consent form. She fiddled with her padd for a few moments and handed it to Rosalie along with a stylus. "Sign here."

_That took too long for a simple consent form,_ he thought, and his brow furrowed in concern.

Rosalie accepted the padd but not the stylus and painstakingly began to read.

"Young lady, my time is very valuable and extremely short. I assure you it's just a standard consent form. Please sign it so we can proceed," Dr. Boswell said impatiently.

Rosalie ignored her, long, bony finger extending to scroll down the screen. Dr. Boswell's lips twitched in a moue of reflexive distaste.

"Dr. McCoy," Rosalie said softly, head bent to the screen.

He approached the bed. "Yes?"

"This isn't a standard consent form. This names her my primary physician and gives her the right to make all medical decisions on my behalf."

"What?"

"There must be some mistake," Dr. Boswell claimed, and reached for the padd, but miraculously Rosalie was faster and handed it to him instead.

He read the document with rising incredulity, and each word stoked the anger that had been rising inside him from the moment Boswell opened her mouth. "Let me guess," he managed through the fury massed in his chest like a crushing fist. "You figured she'd never read it, or that if she did, she'd never understand it."

"Doctor, it was an honest mistake." She offered him an apologetic, collegial smile.

"Mistake, my ass," he snarled. "We're done here." He shouldered her aside and picked up Rosalie, who clung to him as fiercely as she could. He could feel her trembling, the dangerous thrum of a bowstring about to snap.

_It's all right. I've got you now,_ he thought. He fought the impulse to rub her back and dispel a measure of that terrifying tension. _To hell with a proper transfer._ He turned and set her in her chair.

"Go," he said. "Go back to the ship, right now. I won't be far behind."

She turned and fled, bare feet thrust before her like a battering ram, and when he was sure she was out of Boswell's reach, he bent and gathered her shoes, socks and AFOs.

"Doctor McCoy, I assure you-"

He rounded on her, Rosalie's footwear cradled in one arm. "Your assurances are worth less than a counterfeit credit. I know damn well what you were trying to pull. I just got lucky she's a hell of a lot smarter than you give her credit for, and you can bet your ass I'll be filing a complaint with the ethics committee and anyone else who'll listen."

"A complaint from a wet-behind-the ears doctor who's already thumbed his nose at Starfleet regulations at least three times?" She scoffed. "I'm sure it'll be given all the consideration it deserves."

"Goodbye, Ms. Boswell." 

"It's 'Doctor'," she said stiffly.

"No. It isn't."

He turned on his heel and marched out of sickbay, and then he set off for the ship with his heart in his throat and his stomach in his toes. 

_I never should've let that go on,_ he remonstrated with himself as he stalked down the corridor with Rosalie's shoes and braces bundled against his chest. _I should've pulled her off that table the minute she touched her. Now Rosalie's running loose on a starbase barefoot and traumatized and rightly convinced I'm an asshole, and I'm about to get into a career-threatening pissing match with a high-ranking member of Starfleet Medical._

_Just another day in the life of one Leonard H. McCoy,_ sighed the voice of hard experience. _You tried to save your father and failed, sat there in a room that smelled of piss and terror and festering rot and listened to the strongest man you ever knew scream and cry and beg to die while he stewed in his own shit. You got married and failed because you were too busy pickling your guilt with all the booze you could get your hands on and trying to bury a man who wouldn't stay dead. You tried to be a doctor back home and failed because you were too young and untested for folks with eighty years on their old bones. You tried to keep Jim from killing himself and failed because you couldn't stuff enough self-worth and common sense into that idiot head of his, and the only reason he's still walking around is because of a rogue government science project from the past. Now you've tried to help Rosalie and failed because you were too much of a coward to tell that petty tyrant to kiss your ass._

He rounded the sinuous curve in the corridor and stopped. Rosalie sat at the end of the line for the turbolift, feet still outthrust. Her toes fanned and curled, fanned and curled, and her legs twitched convulsively. Her head was bowed, and her hair hung in her face, but he could see her quaking shoulders and her bloodless, white-knuckled grip on her armrests.

_She's about three seconds from a meltdown,_ the doctor inside his head assessed coolly, but his heart lurched inside his chest.

He reached her and dropped into a crouch at her side. "It's Dr. McCoy," he said softly. "Hang in there. We're almost there."

She snorted and turned her turned her head to expose one eye and one pallid cheek. No lively twinkle, no soft, shy smile, only wariness and the expectation of another cruel disappointment. She glanced at the jumble in his arms and turned to study her shuddering knees again.

"Here, let's get your shoes back on." He set the shoes and braces on the ground beside him and snagged her footplate with three fingers. He turned her to face him. "Set your brakes?"

A somnambulistic hand reached down and obeyed. "We're going to miss the turbolift."

He shrugged. "There'll be another." He hovered for a moment. "Can I look at your feet?"

She blinked, surprised that it was a request and not a physician's fiat. Slowly, her left foot extended.

"Thank you." He cupped it in his palm and gingerly raised it to peer at the sole. It was warm, almost hot to the touch, and coated in a fine sheen of sweat. _Fever?_ he wondered. She'd been fine this morning. He carefully inspected the sensitive flesh and winced at the needle mark he found in the center of her sole. Small, but it was already beginning to bruise, and there was even evidence of bleeding. He scowled and dropped his gaze to the footplates, where he discovered several tiny droplets of dried blood.

"Son of a bitch," he swore. _I'm going to have Boswell's ass on a flagpole,_ he vowed. "I'm sorry, Rosalie. I never should've let this happen," he said.

"I trusted you." Mournful, a child who's discovered their parents' most glaring imperfection in a thunderclap of pain and shattered hope.

"I know you did, and I was proud to have it." He gently lowered her foot. "I'm sorry I wasn't worthy of it." He patted her knee.

She cocked her head. "Why didn't you stop her?" Wounded and accusatory.

_Dr. McCoy,_ she echoed inside his head, plaintive and beseeching.

"Because I figured if we just got it over with, she couldn't come back later and claim you didn't give her a chance, or that I was an interfering busybody."

"You were covering your ass."

"And the bases," he retorted. "But yeah, I suppose I was." He shook his head. "Not one of my finer moments, but I wanted to keep you here. Well, not here," he amended. "On the _Enterprise_."

"Why?" Curious now.

_Because I want to know you. I want to know just what I pulled out of the stars like a message in a bottle._

He shrugged. "Because I started this walk with you. It's only right that I finish it," he said and turned his face so she couldn't see the flush creeping into it. He cleared his throat. "Of course, I'll understand if you'd rather I didn't after-"

"There's no way in hell I'm going with Boswell."

"I didn't figure you would, but I can set you up with Pennicott if you want, or M'Benga. He works swing shifts and substitutions."

She studied him, elbows on her armrests and hands skimming her shivering knees. Her hair framed her face in a soft fall of golden wheat. "You're the finest doctor I've ever had. I'm not giving you up because you had a bad morning," she said, and managed a small, pained smile. "Just don't make me go back there."

"Sweetheart, it'll be a cold day in hell before you see that woman again," he promised, and picked up a sock. "I'm going to fix you up once we get back to sickbay. I didn't bring my kit this morning. Are you hurting anywhere besides your feet?" He slipped the sock onto her foot, mindful of the abused flesh.

"I think she wrenched my knees and adductors. They hurt." 

He grunted, unsurprised. He'd seen cadavers handled with more care by first-year med students. "I'm going to leave your braces and shoes off until I fix you up. Otherwise, I'm just going to wind up pulling them off again." He picked them up and set them on her lap. "At least this way, you won't be barefoot _and_ crazy."

She yodeled laughter. 

"I'm going to push you if you don't mind. It'll give both of us a chance to settle."

He circled to the back of her chair and grabbed the push handles, and when she released the brakes, he rolled her toward the turbolift. She trembled on and on, an incessant shiver of nerves and excess adrenaline that bunched her muscles beneath pale flesh and rattled the AFOs in her arms like castanets.

"Easy now," he murmured, and guided her into the turbolift. "If you start feeling pukey or getting chills, put your head as far down as you can. It'll pass. It's just anxiety."

She nodded and closed her eyes. The doors closed, and the lift slid noiselessly downward, quicksilver through an hourglass, and he reached out to brush his fingertips over her shoulderblades in a gesture of comfort. _I'm still here, sweetheart. It's gonna be just fine now._ Up and down, a slow counterpoint to the frenzied electrical impulses racing beneath her skin. Soft and steady, easy as an after-dinner ramble down a winding country road.

"It's all right. It's all right." A reassuring mantra as the turbolift deposited them on the deck and he pushed her toward the familiar comfort of the ship, and by the time they were rolling into sickbay, the helpless, convulsive shuddering had begun to subside. 

He parked her beside her bed and made for his padd and kit. He grabbed both from the desk and returned to squat in front of her. "I'm going to fix you up, I promise," he said, and carefully peeled off her socks. "But I need to document your injuries first. Just give me ten minutes, all right?"

"That's fine," she said, but she didn't sound fine. She sounded uncomfortable and pushed past well past her limit.

He pulled out his bioscanner and ran it over her from head to toe. Heartrate and blood pressure were elevated, and her cortisol levels were off the scale. Body temperature was normal despite the clammy warmth of her feet, and there were no signs of infection or illness. Oxygen levels were normal. Sugar levels were low, but he suspected that could be remedied with a decent meal. Signs of minor dehydration. Progesterone levels were low, testosterone high. He made a mental note to have Nurse Ogawa supply her with whatever form of feminine hygiene product she preferred. Based on her levels, it wouldn't be long, and the last thing he needed was a mess on her sheets or some idiot orderly mistaking it for a catastrophic hemorrhage and calling him in at three in the goddamn morning to be a tampon valet.

Over her legs, and there was clear evidence of bruising on her knees and shins. More bruises on her scrawny calves, and there was a perfect circle around her bony ankles. No sprains, thank God, but a pull on her right adductor.

_Goddamn you, you incompetent tit,_ he thundered inside his head. _And this was from a routine physical. God knows what you might've done with impunity, no oversight, and a little more time._

Deep tissue bruising on both feet, as well as minor puncture wounds in the sole. The damage was more severe than it would have been in the average person. Most people's feet were toughened and desensitized by years of walking, weight-bearing, and incidental contact with hard surface and idly-scrubbing hands, but Rosalie's feet hadn't touched the ground for more than three seconds since they'd pulled her out of her mama, and they'd been insulated from incidental touch by shoes and footplates and layers of plastic and polymer. Dr. Boswell's hasty hands might as well have been iron vises around the thin, delicate bones. She hadn't broken anything, but it had been a near miss, and he had no doubt that Rosalie's feet were throbbing like abscessed teeth.

"Jackass," he muttered darkly, and picked up his padd. "I'm going to photograph these."

She nodded, but her bottom lip disappeared beneath her teeth, and her feet shrank from him, toes curling. Before she turned her head, he saw her face flush with humiliation. He lowered his padd and sat back on his heels.

"The people I'm sending these to are doctors, Miss Walker. I guarantee you they've seen it and worse before."

"I know. It's just-" She chewed her lip gaze fixed on the workstation behind his desk. She shrugged.

_It's just all your flaws out there for the whole world to see._ He thought of her trussed in the stirrups while gawking obgyn interns paraded through the room like schoolchildren on a field trip and recorded her humiliation for posterity on their clipboards.

"I won't do this if you don't want me to," he said. "But it might be the only way to hold her accountable and bring her down a peg."

"Go on," she said thickly. "Just...not my face."

"Not your face," he agreed. It didn't matter; her face would be part of the dossier should his complaint ever come before the ethics committee, but if granting her this small, useless mercy sweetened the bitter medicine he was asking her to swallow, then he'd do it gladly.

He started with her feet. He photographed them from every angle. She whimpered when he picked them up to photograph the bottoms and tried to pull them from his grasp. 

"I know," he soothed. "I know it hurts. I can feel the swelling. I'm sorry, sugar. Just let me get this picture and I'll treat it."

She whimpered again, but her feet relaxed, and he silently blessed her forebearance. He raised one rapidly-darkening foot and took several closeups of the puncture in the thin flesh. Another set for the other foot, and then he opened his kit and produced an analgesic hypo and a tissue regenerator. "Here we go," he said, and pressed the hypo to the top of her foot. She flinched at the sudden cold pressure but managed to hold the foot steady.

_Good girl,_ he thought, and pressed it to the other foot. "Almost done. That should help the pain. She bruised you to the bone."

Her only response was a snort. _I told you so._

_I know you did,_ and the guilt bubbled in his stomach and soured his mouth. He picked up the regenerator and pressed it to her foot. "This'll heal the injury itself."

He felt her relax underneath his hand as the regenerator did its work, and when he glanced up, he was pleased to see a hint of color in her cheeks. Her foot was cooling, too, and losing its noisome clamminess. The regenerator chirped to signal the completion of its task, and he switched to the other foot.

"You've got some bruises and a mild pull of your adductor, but you should be fine in a day or so," he told her. "I'll tell Stuart and Connor to go easy on the leg stretches tomorrow, but you need to get back at it or you'll lose the ground you've gained."

"Yes, Doctor."

"As for today, once I've finished patching you up, we're going to the commissary to get you fed. And watered. You're dehydrated again."

She had the grace to look abashed. "Sorry. I was so nervous that I was worried about having an accident."

_The way things went this morning, I wouldn't've blamed you if you had. Would've served her right._ "Well, there's nothing to worry about now except collapse from malnutrition." The regenerator chirped, and he switched it off and set it aside.

"Can't you just use the replicator?"

"I could, but you need to get out of here for a while, eat real food and be someplace that's not sickbay. See other people." He picked up her foot and began to massage it with his palms, erasing Boswell's grip with each deft, measured press. She needed touch that didn't hurt, didn't carry with it the promise of pain and suffering. He couldn't hold her hand or stroke her hair or sing lullabies in her ear like her mother or her memaw would have done, but he could do this, could offer her a touch of human kindness to offset the lonely, grinding monotony of rehab and the uncertainty of life as the last of her kind.

She purred, and her toes stretched into his touch, a cat lazily extending its claws as it drowsed in the summer sun. "Feels good," she murmured, and tilted her head back to expose her pale throat.

He hummed in acknowledgment. "Your PCAs ever do this?"

"Only when they were washing my feet in the shower," she answered, and yawned. "Grandmama took me for pedicures now and then. I never much cared for the filing because I was so ticklish, but I loved the footbath and massage."

He rubbed her baby toe between his thumb and forefinger and grinned surreptitiously at the floor at the resultant unseemly sigh that slipped from her mouth. Her entire foot contracted with the pleasure of the unexpected touch, and he heard her seat cushion hiss as she rose off the seat for an instant. Another measured tug, another throaty sigh that spoke of hands in far less innocent places. He repeated the process with the next toe, and the next, and each time, her foot curled and splayed and pressed eagerly into his hand in search of greater contact.

_Dr. McCoy, this is an ethics violation on par with that of Dr. Boswell earlier today,_ warned the disapproving voice of the doctor inside his head, and while he could not disagree, nor could he bring himself to care. He'd never seen anyone so touch-starved in his life, so hungry for human contact not wrought of necessity. Jim had his moments, of course, chummy and convivial and constantly slinging his arms around his shoulders as they walked the corridors or drunk and clinging after one too many shots and too many reminiscences about his dead and sainted father and what he might think of his boy made good, but he at least had the friendly touches of a crew that had rapidly come to adore him--Nyota's pats on the wrist after the Friday night poker games, Scotty's backpats as they discussed plans for routine maintenance. Weekly sparring sessions in the gym with Sulu, where they engaged in a bit of good-natured tussling in the name of fitness and greater combat proficiency.

And the women, of course. Starfleet had no explicit prohibitions against fraternization, but damned if Jim wasn't going whole hog. He was fairly certain he'd bedded at least half of his nursing staff and a good number of the yeomen. He'd heard a few stories, a few whispers drifting out of the commissary and the scrub room about the good captain and his penchant for loving and leaving, and there was the sad business of Christine Chapel, who'd packed up and transferred out after a simple roll in the hay had soured into frustrated, mismatched expectations on both sides. He was still pissed about that, truth be told. Chapel had been the finest head nurse on his staff, and while Ogawa was perfectly competent in the position, she simply couldn't match Chapel's ability to run sickbay with well-oiled precision.

And then there were the persistent rumors about him and Carol Marcus that had sent him running for the medkit and its prophylactic hypos. Jim had just grinned and nudged him with his shoulder and flashed him a sunny, cocksure grin and told him not to worry, but he couldn't shake the feeling that the whole business was going to end in a sorry mess.

_You say that about everything, Bones,_ Jim said inside his head.

_And nine times out of ten, I'm right,_ he countered as his fingers kneaded a stubborn knot of tension where her arch should have been. Above him, Rosalie moaned softly.

_We're alive, aren't we?_

_Only because Spock and I are there to haul your ass out of the fire. Besides, that's an awful low bar to set for success._

Jim only grinned, all cornfed Iowa innocence, and McCoy only growled and shook his head and returned to the task at hand and to Rosalie, whom he suspected had never been afforded the opportunity to be so damn stupid. He couldn't speak to her life before her date with that godforsaken cryotube, but from what little she'd told him, there hadn't been many friends to pat her shoulder or ruffle her hair or offer the occasional hug after a night of dancing and drinking. No team sports or group hike, no aerobics or cycling classes, no swim team or horseback riding. No getting sloppy drunk with friends and lying in a contented tangle of limbs while she laughed and nothing in particular. And no sheepish morning-after goodbyes. No reason to touch another human being just because.

Lack of touch could be just as harmful as a blow if it went on long enough. He'd seen bright-eyed foals and waggle-tailed puppies go dead-eyed and catshit mean after being left too long to their own devices, abandoned in stalls and tied to trees once the novelty wore off, lying in the dirt and snapping at anyone who drew near because experience had taught them that nothing good ever came from a descending hand.

He'd seen it in people, too, in children ignored by workaholic parents and old folks left to rot in rest home common rooms. After a while, they simply surrendered to the isolation and smothering loneliness and waited to die, going through the motions until their bodies quit. Rosalie wasn't nearly so far gone, but the eagerness with which she nudged her foot into his cupping hands spoke of loneliness gone deep into the bone, the kind of loneliness that hollowed everything it touched and left behind nothing but eyes full of what might've been.

_You've felt like that a time or two. After your father died, the guilt and loneliness threatened to swallow you whole. You spent the days before the funeral with your arms wrapped around your belly, swallowing sobs and lurching through the too-quiet rooms of your childhood home like a drunk. Hell, you wanted to be drunk, to numb the gaping hole inside your chest with something stronger than well-meant platitudes and cold casseroles from the neighbors who came to call, but you needed to be strong for your mother, who shattered with her husband's final breath, so you staggered through the hours with your guts cradled in your arms and observed the social graces expected of you as a son of David McCoy. And when you couldn't take it any more, you fled to the barn and curled up in the corner of an empty stall and cried yourself sick, shielded from scrutiny by hay and horseflesh._

_You felt it when Pamela left, curled on a marital bed gone cold and staring at your wedding band through bloodshot eyes. Sometimes you curled yourself around her pillow just to have something to hold and pressed your nose to the pillowcase to catch a trace of her scent through the reek of bourbon. The bottom dropped out the night you couldn't smell her anymore, and you shredded the pillowcases and threw them in the recycler, and then you drank yourself blind on the living room floor and cried for your wife and your Daddy and the children you'd never managed. You cried for anyone to come and put you back together again, but you'd put your father in the ground and Pamela had left and taken your future with you, and you were too ashamed to show up on your mother's porch--and it was just hers now--with snot on your face and whiskey on your breath, so you curled into a ball to protect your soft insides and slept on the floor. And you would've stayed there forever if the process server hadn't shown up the next morning with the papers in his hand. His footsteps on the front steps sounded so much like your father's boots on the front porch that you thought it was him for a minute, that it had all been a terrible nightmare from which you had awoken. Then you opened the door and saw that bland little messenger boy with his padd in his hand and a stillborn smile pasted on his face, and you knew. A press of a button, and you were ordered out of the house you'd thought to be your home. Fifteen minutes later, you were standing on the end of the driveway with a box in your hands and a duffel at your feet._

_You felt it in that shuttle bathroom, hiding on the toilet like a goddamn stowaway and wondering how your life had come to this. A refugee on your own planet, sleeping in hostels and shelters and eating MREs handed out by Federation relief workers who served them with distant, sympathetic smiles. Sometimes you earned your keep by volunteering in the makeshift clinics, but very few folks wanted to chance it with a tosspot itinerant with bloodshot eyes and three days' stubble on his chin. Nowhere to go and no one to love, and too ashamed to let your mother see what you'd become, so you took your chances in space, where no one would know the extent of your disgrace. If it wouldn't have cost innocent lives, you'd've been glad if the shuttle imploded shortly after takeoff and took your worthless life with it._

_Truth be told, this is as much for you as it is for her. You can't remember when you last touched someone for the sheer kindness of it. Jim, probably, slaloming out of some bar arm-in-arm, or that sweet, young woman you dated for a few months at the Academy. She was smart and driven and kind, and it was obvious that she was sweet on you, but she was also too soon, too close to Pamela, who still haunted your dreams and reminded you of all your failures. Jim or that woman, it's been years since you've touched for the simple comfort of it. Taking care of Rosalie salves that godawful ache in the center of your chest that throbs and pulses with the purulence of bitter memories. You couldn't save your father, and you couldn't repair the wreck you made of your marriage while you wallowed in your guilt and heard the hiss of a hypo in your burning ears, but you can do this. There is still good in your hands, still warmth. You can't make her walk, can't lift this burden from her, but you can make it easier to bear and remind her that not everything in the world cuts and breaks and bruises._

He cupped her heel and lightly pinched her heel cord, and she shivered and rose in the chair, a cat arching to meet an idle caress. She gazed down at him through half-lidded eyes, fingers curled around the armrests of her chair. "You are the oddest doctor I've ever met," she said. "I've never had one rub my feet."

"You need seeing to," he said gruffly, and squeezed her foot to send any excess fluid toward her kidneys.

She reached out and brushed his shoulder. "Thank you. For trying. Even my own parents gave up on me, and now here you are just..." She blinked and swallowed. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were an angel."

He snorted. "Don't let your imagination run away with you. I'm just a country doctor." He set down her foot and picked up the other.

She quieted, and little by little, the tension ebbed from her until she was limp as a noodle in her chair. She blinked at him with drowsy affection and dozed as his fingers did their patient work, and as she sagged in her chair, slack and placid and content, he found that his own body was relaxing, too. His jaw relaxed with an audible creak, and the headache that had massed behind his temples in the aftermath of his skirmish with Boswell receded.

He stopped when he reached the bruises on her calf. "All right. Let's get you fed." He put down her foot and picked up her socks.

She snorted and started and sat up in her chair. "Bless you, Doctor McCoy," she said, and wiggled her feet with relish.

"It's my job."

"No, it isn't."

_No, it isn't,_ he agreed, but he only put on her socks and AFOs and shoes and rose with a mutinous creak from his knees. "Come on," he ordered, and gestured toward the door.

She smiled, and in it, he saw the soul behind her battered armor, tenacious and hopeful and lovely. It made her beautiful, and behind the ever-present ache in his chest, his heart fluttered.

_There's something here, son,_ his mother said. _Tend it carefully, and you might be surprised by what you get._

_She's my patient, Mama,_ he reminded her. _All I'm gonna get is a successful outcome_

His mother only smiled, and as Rosalie rolled out the door, his own lips responded in kind.


	11. Fruits of Poisoned Labors

They departed Starbase 4517 at 0730 the next morning, bound for a routine check of Ceti Alpha V. Rosalie never did get those temporary quarters. Instead, she slept in sickbay aboard the _Enterprise_ , curled beneath the covers in her biobed with her padd on the tray table beside her, and when the ship slipped out of the docking bay with the buoyant glide of engaging thrusters, she put down her glass of orange juice and did an uncoordinated, capering jig in her chair, feet clacking on the footplates and arms flailing giddily. It was such a joyous dance that he chuckled as he watched her over the top of his padd.

She blushed to the roots of her hair and lowered her arms. "Sorry," she muttered sheepishly.

"I'm not."

That radiant, lovely grin. "Me neither," she admitted, and wiggled in her chair. She bounced as she picked up her glass and drained the contents in two long swallows.

"You do realize this means it's back to the grind?" He set his padd down and sat back in his chair.

"I do," she answered, and picked up her empty glass in a futile effort to coax a few last drops from the bottom.

"You want some more?" he asked, pleased at the uptick in her appetite and the remarkable improvement in her attitude.

"Please?" She held out the empty glass.

He rose from his seat and plucked it from her grasp. "More orange juice, coming up." He carried the glass to the replicator, placed it under the dispenser, and keyed in his request. "I'll have to teach you how to use this now that you'll be here a while." He carried the refilled glass to her tray table and set it down.

"Thank you, Doctor." Thin, splayed fingers snaked out to curl around the bottom of the glass, and she pulled toward herself with painstaking care. When it was close enough, she picked it up in both hands and took a prodigious gulp.

_Good,_ he thought. _She needs to get her body back on track. Thanks to the illustrious Dr. Boswell, she's been afraid to do anything but hide in the bed and cling to her padd. Barely ate unless I prodded her and drank even less. Didn't do laps around sickbay, didn't ask to look out the window. Just stared at that damn padd and stole glances at the sickbay doors like she expected Boswell's goons to storm in and carry her off._

_Frankly, you were worried about the same thing,_ his conscience admitted. _It's why you've been hovering ever since she came back with her Federation credentials, and why you copied them in triplicate just in case of convenient database failure. You couldn't shake the sneaking suspicion that it was too easy, that before you left, she'd try an end run around standard Federation protocols and trump up a reason why Rosalie had to stay, and never mind her wishes on the matter or the properly-filed paperwork. Maybe she'd demand another, more thorough psych eval from a third party or make the not-entirely-invalid claim that the_ Enterprise _was hardly the best place for someone to undergo intensive rehab and acclimatization to modern society. After all, nearly getting blown to smithereens in a life-or-death struggle for the fate of the Federation was an annual event in these parts. Either way, Dr. Boswell didn't strike you as the type to give up easily._

_Which is why you never let Rosalie out of your sight once you patched her up and got her fed and watered. You planted yourself at her table in the commissary while she picked at her food, one eye on your padd and one on the door, and you ate your vegetarian chili without tasting it because you were too busy scrutinizing other diners for signs of nefarious motives. When she was finished, you gave her a brief tour of the station in which neither of you had much interest, and then you shepherded her back to the safety of the ship, where she sought refuge in her bed and you hunkered behind your desk like a knight at the battlements._

_It's also why you filed a complaint with the ethics committee that same afternoon. You gave Rosalie a chance to rest, and then you prodded her up and out of bed in order to take her statement. You felt like a rotten sonofabitch asking her to relive that carnival of indignities so soon, but you knew that you had to get her account on record as soon as possible, lest someone accuse you of coaching her or influencing her recollection of events. So you waved your padd in her pinched, dispirited face and made her recount the whole sorry spectacle in a drained monotone that made your skin crawl because it was so unlike the woman you'd known just the night before, when you'd both set to laughing over a slice of bad peach pie. And when it was over, you bundled it with your written account of the misconduct, your official complaint under the appropriate statutes, and the footage from Boswell's sickbay and sent it to the ethics committee and the chief of Starfleet Medical. You were tempted to send them copies of her enthralling little treatises on the eugenics policies of Philip Green while you were at it, but in the end, you left those lie for fear of being accused of biased muckraking. Then you sat in your chair and watched her slump in hers like the weight of the world was on her bowed shoulders and cursed that arrogant idiot for making her road far harder than it had to be._

_You figured you'd asked enough of her for one day, so you just reminded her to sit up straight and let her be, but you never let her out of sight. You watched her out of the corner of your eye while you scrolled through pill and sheet counts and filed various training certificates for the interns. You reviewed rotation change requests and sick leave requests. You kept an ear open while you double-checked the count and dosages on the prophylactic hypos and the binary-method birth control injections. You kept hoping she would talk, even if only to herself while she fiddled with her padd, but she was morose and silent, lost as she'd been during that first groggy day when she'd awakened to find herself so long and far from home._

_You were reluctant to leave her alone in a deserted sickbay, so you found reasons to putter around until 2300. You considered staying overnight, bunking down in the cot in your office, but Boswell's smarmy accusation of emotional overinvestment dogged you, so you made a final check of her covers and left a glass of water(with flexible straw)within reach on the tray, and then you went to your quarters for the night. You left your com on all night in case she called for you in the night, tormented by a fresh spate of nightmares, but she never made a peep. The only sounds were her deep and even breathing and the rustle of the covers as she rolled in her sleep. No goons crashing the gate, no terrified cries, and it wasn't long before you went out like a light, exhausted by the constant vigilance._

Well, there was no need for it now. The specter of Dr. Boswell was receding with every second. There was the possibility--the eventual probability, really--of a hearing before the ethics committee, but that was weeks, if not months, in the future. Starfleet Medical received hundreds of thousands of communiques a day from ships, shuttles, outposts, and starbases across the galaxy, and while complaints were fast-tracked through the labyrinthine system, the cogs of bureaucracy still ground exceedingly fine. If he were lucky, he'd receive acknowledgment of receipt within forty-eight hours. After that, it was anyone's guess. Hell, if Starfleet were particularly backlogged, he might not hear boo on the subject until Rosalie was disembarking the ship with her bags in hand.

_And if there is a hearing? If Starfleet demands you testify before the committee? If they want her to testify?_

They'd cross that bridge when they came to it. Until then, there were more important matters he could deal with, such as getting her rehab back on schedule. He snagged a stool with the toe of his boot and swung it into position in front of her. Then he settled himself on it, knees splayed. "Now that I know you're not going anywhere, we need to discuss your rehab."

She paused in the act of taking another sip. "Have I not been doing well?" she asked

"No, no, you're doing just fine, coming along very well," he assured her. "I couldn't be more pleased. I'd just like to talk about adding a few things to your current repertoire."

"Like what?" Dubious. She took another sip of juice.

"Dr. Boswell's assessment aside, you're improving. Your muscles are getting stronger, your ligaments more flexible. Your bone density is increasing. You're nowhere close to normal levels yet, and you won't be for a while, but at least you won't break your damn ankles transferring to the toilet." He held out his hand and beckoned for a socked foot, which was duly presented. "You're not shying from incidental touch, either." To demonstrate the point, he drew a thumb over the plane of her foot. "All incredibly positive signs. So I'd like to start you on basic transfer training."

"What's your definition of basic?" She swirled the contents of her glass.

"Right now? I'll be happy if you just get easy with rolling over and sitting up on your own for as long as a minute. I'd also like to work on determining your center of gravity and getting you comfortable with shifting your weight. You haven't had to do it much, and you need to learn. Maybe once you get to Earth, you can get set up with PCAs to do for you like you're used to, but here on the ship, you're on your own. I can't spare the personnel. Besides, the more you can do for yourself, the better. PCAs get sick or stuck in traffic or just say the hell with it, and if they do, you'll be prepared to fend for yourself while you figure out whose ass to chew."

She grinned at that. "At least you didn't call me lazy." Her gaze dropped to her glass.

"Miss Walker, that is the last word I'd use to describe you." He gave her foot a reassuring squeeze. "You just need the proper tools, is all."

"When do we start?"

"I'd like to start this morning."

She nodded as though that were the response she'd been expecting. "Does this add more time to my sessions?" she asked, and set the now-empty glass on the tray table, and he didn't miss the mournful note in the question.

_Probably figures I'm going to start chipping away at her free time until her life is an unending series of sessions and appointments and dates with the therapy mat._ "No. An hour and a half is what I asked of you, and I don't intend to change that anytime soon. I figure we can schedule it for the last half-hour of your daily sessions. I'd like to start at three times a week and work up from there."

"Will you be the one doing it?" She tugged fretfully on her fingers.

"I'll be supervising the first few sessions until Connor and Stuart get the hang of it, and I'll be checking in on you from time to time to make sure no one's getting lazy."

"Will it hurt?"

He lowered her foot and surveyed her in silence. _She asks that a lot. It's like she expects everything she does or achieves to be an endurance contest between her spirit and her flesh, like she has to know if she can take it._

Not for the first time, he wondered just what kind of medicine they'd practiced back then, in a time before laser scalpels and bioscanners and tissue regenerators that did the work of healing without the penance of pain. He thought of screaming boys in wooden boxes, and of the scars on her thighs and the backs of her knees, and of her terror of the benign Dr. Pennicott as he'd advanced on her in the middle of the night with a hypo full of good intentions.

He rocked the stool to and fro with the back of his heel. "I won't lie, you're going to be plenty sore the first few times, especially your arms and shoulders, probably your back, too. And the soreness'll make you want to stiffen up, but it's important that you don't. You need to keep moving and stretching so those muscles don't seize up on you. That said, it shouldn't _hurt._ I'll give you something for the pain and inflammation to keep you comfortable. I'm not a bastard." 

"Dr. McCoy, you are anything but," she said. He was pleased to see that her stress levels were at zero. She'd been operating under a siege mentality for far too long. "I suppose it's back to the grind, then?" She straightened in her chair and put her hands on the rims as though to head for her morning shower.

She sounded so resigned, a soldier heading for the tedium of the trench, and he made a decision. "You most certainly are," he confirmed. "But we're going to do things a little differently today."

"We are?" She straightened further.

"We are. You're going to take a shower, and I'm going to have a cup of coffee, and when you're done, we're going on a tour of the ship. If you're going to be here for the next year, you ought to make yourself acquainted with it. Sickbay might be the best part of the ship, but it's far from the only one, and it may be you find something other than your padd to occupy your mind. We'll do your session and assessment when you get back. Deal?"

She bounced in her chair, and her eyes sparkled inside her face. "Oh, I feel like I should get all dressed up," she said, and clapped her hands in happy anticipation.

He fought to suppress a grin. "It's just a starship, not the promenade."

Her cheeks turned a lovely rose. "It might be old hat to you, Doctor, but it's my first one. It's like your first glimpse of a champion quarterhorse or your first ride in a ragtop convertible with the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. You never forget it."

Her delight was infectious, and he rocked on the balls of his feet. "Well, Miss Walker, it would be my pleasure to escort you on your first encounter."

"And the pleasure of your company will be mine," she answered, and inclined her head.

_I do believe that's Rosalie for a curtsey,_ he mused, and his lips twitched in admiration.

It fascinated him, the way she adapted as best she could to the demands of both the world in which she found herself and the one from which she had so rudely departed. She had been raised to politeness and civility despite the fragility of her body, and when she could not curtsey for the seat under her behind or the lopsided weakness of her legs, she simply found another way. He wondered how she'd come to it, that simple, elegant dip of her head. Had it been a moment of happy serendipity, a movement never intended but gladly appropriated and refashioned to her purpose, or was it the product of hours of dogged, painstaking practice in front of a mirror, dipping and nodding and wrestling unruly nerves and spastic muscles into submission?

_The latter, I suspect,_ he thought as she grinned at him. _I don't think her body ever gave her an inch she didn't pay for in pain and shame._

He pictured her in front of that mirror, ten years old and with her long, golden hair in a ponytail, staring into the spotless glass and willing her scrawny, bowed body to unfurl, to become as lithe and supple as her mother's, as everyone else's. Fingers curled so tightly around the armrests of her chair that her nails pierced the cheap vinyl. Cheeks flushed with exertion and stiff-necked determination as she dipped and bobbed like a disgruntled cockatiel as she fought to mimic the fluid movement meant for knees and hips. Hisses of frustration and helpless tears as the girl in the mirror fell short of the one in her head. Salt and despair on her upper lip and clogging her nose.

God knew how long it took. Years, maybe. Years of sitting in front of that mirror and bobbing and rocking and dipping and strangling the armrests of her chair in a white-knuckled grip. Years of salt and sweat on her upper lip, until it was as familiar to her as her mama's sweet tea. Years of cursing her intransigent body for its refusal to yield.

And then, one day, probably when she least expected it, it had happened. Obdurate muscles had relaxed just enough, and a graceless, spasmodic bob had become an elegant dip. For one fleeting instant, the girl in the mirror had matched the one in her head. A hard-won victory. 

_How long did it take you? Three years? Four? Longer? Were you dreaming of some snaggle-toothed kid in junior-high study hall, or were you still practicing it when all the other girls were swanning effortlessly down the spiral staircase at their debutante ball? An inch of ground and a single scrap of normal, and all it took was six years in front of a mirror._

He couldn't ask her; it was too personal, too far beyond the bounds of his professional mandate, so he crossed his arms and said, "Go on, now. Get showered. There's a lot to see, and I want to get your assessment done before dinner."

She executed that dainty bob again and spun in her chair, and then she was off like a shot in search of an available nurse or orderly. When she had corralled a willing amanuensis and disappeared through the sickbay doors, he made a beeline for the replicator and ordered coffee with three sugars. 

_Hypocrite,_ muttered his conscience as he carried the steaming cup to his desk, but he banished it with an indifferent grunt and sat down. He'd mainlined the stuff in his med school and academy days, cup after cup as he'd pulled all-nighters and powered through mandatory clinic hours and endless rotations on various wards. Besides, it was a much better vice than booze, which had nearly pickled his mind and his liver in the year after his father's death and during his interminable divorce, when Pamela's ambitious, cold-blooded lawyer had done his level best to pick the meat from his bones and she had been only too happy to help, determined to avenge too many nights left alone while he fought a battle he couldn't win.

_Your father's death,_ his conscience sneered. _That's a neat way of putting it._

_Please, son. Please._

He silenced the voice with a sip of coffee and grimaced. Scalded water, heavily sugared. He drank it anyway. The alternative was a morning without caffeine, and that was a burden he refused to bear. Caffeine blunted the sharp edge of his tongue and softened the fractious edges of his temper, and his staff had learned not to come to him with ridiculous requests or confessions of momentary idiocy before he'd had his first jolt of liquid patience.

_You did well enough with Rosalie._

_Rosalie is a patient. Patients don't get the sharp edge of my tongue unless they've earned it by being a fool._

_You mean like the engineering yeoman who came in last week with scald injuries?_ the voice reminded him.

_Any engineering yeoman who stayed awake in Intro Maintenance knows the jeffries tubes run hot down by the laundry,_ he protested. _If the idiot hadn't been trying to watch porn on his padd while venting the tubes, he'd've had two hands and eyes on the job. I bet Scotty has him cleaning the deck with his toothbrush._

He was about to continue his impassioned defense of his bedside manner when Rosalie returned from the shower. She had traded her loose morning scrubs for a crisp, white blouse and black pencil skirt that fell to her calves. Black nylons peeked from beneath the hem. If it weren't for the incongruous, white sneakers on her feet, she could've passed for a professor on her way to her first lecture of the day. 

_Or the naughty librarian in a porno,_ his mind supplied helpfully as he took in the sleek, golden fall of her hair over one shoulder, and he seized his coffee cup and sought refuge behind the rim to smother a mortified splutter.

"I figured it wouldn't be polite to go wandering around the ship looking like an escapee from the long-term ward," she explained, and her lips shone with a thin coat of clear gloss. Powder on her nose and blush on her cheeks. "I'm not up on current fashion trends, but I thought you couldn't go wrong with clean and simple." She raised her shoulders in a diffident hitch.

_This is who's hiding under the grit and bruises left by all that damage,_ he marveled, and his mouth went dry. She was beautiful, warm sunlight on cool, clear water, and his fingers itched to stroke her hair and test its glossy softness.

Instead, he drained the last of his coffee and said, "You look just fine. Besides, this isn't a beauty pageant. Most folks around here make do with Starfleet-issue." He set down his empty cup and retrieved his pouch from the bottom drawer of his desk. He clipped it to the waistband of his pants at the hip and rounded the desk.

Rosalie's eyes fell to the pouch. "Does this tour come with a few free jabs?"

He snorted. "No. Though now that I think on it, you're due for your first round of vaccinations. This is just a precaution. If I leave it, I'm liable to stumble headlong into some ensign who scratched himself after handling a Rigellian puffer pod in the botanical lab."

"I take it that's bad."

Another snort. "The pods produce a fine pollen. Most of the time, it's harmless, just a minor irritant, like dust or ragweed. But put it anywhere near a mucous membrane or genitalia, and you're in for a world of regret."

"You speaking from experience?" she asked as they headed for the door.

"I'm a doctor," he answered, noncommittal and evasive.

Her lips curled into a smirk. "I see." Her eyes twinkled.

"Anyway," he said, and tried to ignore the heat blossoming in his cheeks, "it burns like napalm and is just as hard to get off. And if that's not bad enough, it causes severe swelling."

She winced. "How bad?"

"Like a pool noodle."

She giggled. "Oh, heavens. If it weren't for the godawful burning, it could be alien Enzyte."

"Enzyte?"

"When I was little, they had these ads on TV for 'natural male enhancement.' You popped a pill, and it was supposed to increase the size of your-" She paused to consider the politest term. "-business," she concluded delicately.

It was so prim and genteel, so Southern, that he wanted to laugh.

_What was it she called me?_ He bit the inside of his cheek to quash a fit of laughter. _The last piece of home that I've got left. Well, she's got home in every pore._

"Don't tell me: it sold."

"I guess it must've. The ads ran for years. The fellow in them even got a name. Smilin' Bob."

"Smilin' Bob?" He stepped into the corridor and set off for the turbolift.

"Mmhm. He always had this creepy, exaggerated smile on his face. Like the Joker, except too busy getting up to the business to fuss with killing. Later on, there was even a Mrs. Smilin' Bob. She had a smile big as life, too. Due to her husband's recent upturn in his business dealings, or so the commercials would have you believe, but I suspect she was just glad to have a break from all her husband's fiddling."

He bit the inside of his cheek again and shook his head in disbelief. "And people believed this nonsense?"

She shrugged as they joined the knot of people waiting for the turbolift. "I surely couldn't tell you. Maybe they did. They bought enough to keep the company going for years, after all. Or maybe they were just desperate. Desperation makes people stupid. People used to believe Spanish fly was an aphrodisiac. Don't you have that kind of thing nowadays?"

"What? Aphrodisiacs?"

She shook her head, and her hair cascaded over her thin shoulder like silk. "People peddling miracle cures on TV. Diets. Exercise equipment. Investment opportunities in rare gold coins."

"Crooks and snake-oil salesmen, you mean." He tore his gaze from her hair and clasped his hands behind his back. "The Federation has strict regulations against those kinds of schemes. Had to after the war. They were rampant. Every con artist and their grandmother were shilling cures for radiation sickness, and thousands died swilling turpentine and antifreeze. Took years to get it under control." He waited for her to roll into the turbo lift and stepped in behind her. "There are still pockets of black-market drugs on Earth, but not many. The Ferengi do a brisk trade in them, but the Ferengi trade in anything worth a credit."

"Credit?"

"It's the unit of currency for Federation planets that still use money, which are most of them." 

Her brow furrowed. "So other planets use money, but we don't? How does trade work then?"

"Credits. I get credits every month for being a CMO. I can use them to buy things on shore leave."

"Ah, so you _do_ get paid."

The doors opened, and he stepped into the corridor. "In a manner of speaking, I guess, but it isn't much, and it's only good on planets not named Earth. Most of the time, they just sit there, gathering dust and interest."

She followed him out, faithful as a shadow. "Well, at least you can have savings."

_Oh, I had savings, and plenty of them,_ he thought bitterly as he strode toward the promenade deck. _The lawyers and Pamela made short work of that. She got every penny I'd made and the house besides and left me sleeping in motels and Federation shelters and choking down MREs, I was six months at the Academy before I got the smell out of my clothes._

"Don't know what I'd use them for," he said, and tried not to think of Pamela's face as she'd stood in front of an Atlanta judge and demanded everything he owned as recompense for the sins of inattention and strangling grief.

He'd be the first to admit he'd been a sorry excuse for a husband once his father took sick shortly after they married. He'd been fresh out of med school and convinced he could save him if he tried hard enough, could do what all those doctors with years of experience could not. He'd spent days at a time holed up in labs and obsessing over charts and readouts until his eyes burned. He'd slept in his clothes at his desk and concocted dozens of serums and implausible treatment regimens and gone home smelling of stale sweat and unbrushed teeth. He'd stayed only long enough to shower and pick up a change of clothes, and Pamela had been left alone in a bed meant for two.

He'd driven his parents to appointments and consultations and held his mother's hand while specialists delivered dire prognoses and spoke of timetables and stages of progression, and once they'd determined there was nothing more to be done and sent his father home to wither inside his skin, he'd spent his days at the lab and the long night hours on the farm, sleeping in his childhood bed and listening to his father snore. His mother had tried to tell him, had urged him to go home and see to his wife, but the thought of living his life while his father's faded with every hour had struck him as an act of treachery. So he'd shaken his head and stayed as long as she'd let him, and when she'd chivvied him out, he'd gone to the labs instead of going home.

Pamela had tried at first, God bless her soul. She'd kept food waiting in the oven and wrapped up in the refrigerator and left clean clothes by the door along with his comb and his toothbrush. She'd sent notes of encouragement to his padd and left love notes scattered around the house or stuck to the steering wheel of his car. She'd come to the labs a few times with sandwiches wrapped in foil and Thermoses full of soup and rubbed his head and shoulders while he glowered at screens that refused to reveal the secrets of his father's salvation, but consumed as he'd been, he'd scarcely paid her any mind as she'd wrapped her arms around him and pressed kisses to the top of his head. He should've appreciated it, treasured it for the love it was, but he'd been too busy trying to cheat death to notice. It shamed him to think of it now, but he'd even shrugged her off a time or two, irritated that she was distracting him from the pursuit.

He'd been a fool, a short-sighted fool, and it had only gotten worse. Three months after they sent him home with a handshake and a bag full of medications to slow the progression of the disease, the bad days had begun to far outnumber the good. One morning just before Thanksgiving, his father had stopped with his spoonful of oatmeal halfway to his mouth, blinked at his mother with foggy, uncomprehending eyes, and said, _Who are you?_ His mother had called him, crying so hard he could scarcely understand her, and he had gone home with a suitcase and a pouch full of hypos.

And still Pamela hadn't given up. She'd come each afternoon to spell his mother while she ran errands in town or just took a walk around the farm to clear her head and breathe air not fraught with tension and festering grief. She'd read to his father and tidied the house and helped make supper. She'd been there the first time his father forgot his name and asked what a farm boy was doing being so familiar in his house, and she'd done her best to console his mother as she sat in the kitchen and wept into a dishtowel so the sound wouldn't carry to their bedroom, where his father moaned in his fitful sleep. He should've venerated her for that, shouldn't extracted his head from his ass and kissed her hands and face and thanked her for her sacrifice and unwavering patience, but he'd been wild with grief, made savage and blind by it, and he'd taken it for granted and barreled deeper into the hunt, left her to fend for herself while he brooded and fixated and chased shadows that dissipated at his tremulous, hopeful touch.

She'd made a last-ditch effort that Christmas, had come to the farmhouse with groceries piled in her arms and a too-wide smile stretched across her face and done her damnedest to will the Christmas spirit into brittle bones and preoccupied minds. She'd stocked the pantry and scrubbed the kitchen and then she'd spent most of two days cooking turkeys and pies and assorted sides. She'd hovered and goaded them to eat, and she'd coaxed him outside to walk around the pastures. He could still remember the weight of her head against his shoulder as they'd circled the paddock and the rasp of his flannel shirt against his skin. He wished like hell he could go back and put his arm around her instead of letting it hang limply at his side while he plodded over the frost-bitten soil and worked out chemical equations for yet another miracle serum. But he had been too far gone, pulled too deeply within himself, and by the time he'd realized his mistake, it had been too late.

_Sometimes you wonder when it was that she gave up,_ his conscience mused as he guided Rosalie toward the promenade. _Maybe it was then, when nothing she said or did could turn your head the way she used to do when the mere sound of her voice stirred the butterflies in your stomach and made your heart turn a giddy fillip inside your chest. Or maybe it was when the food she cooked went largely untouched, nibbled at by unenthusiastic mouths inside hangdog faces. You can still hear the solid, final thud the turkey made as it bounced down the recycler chute, eleven pounds of a twelve-pound bird still on the bone. You can still smell the pies, too, cherry and pecan, cloyingly sweet in the heavy air._

_And you can still hear her crying, standing over the sink with her hands braced on the counter and her hair in her face. Quiet. No anger then, not yet, just hurt and exhaustion. You should've gone to her then, should've slipped your hands around her waist and rested your chin on her shoulder like you did when you were courting and utterly besotted, and told her that you loved her, because you did, you truly did, but then your father started hollering from upstairs, terrified by the unfamiliarity of the room he'd slept in every night for forty years, and you left her to cry it out over dirty silverware while you went upstairs and wrestled him back into bed._

_Maybe it was then, or maybe it was later, when she crawled into your boyhood bed and pressed her cold, bare feet into your calves and pressed hot, slow kisses to your nape and shoulders and murmured,_ Please, Leo, honey, please. C'mon, darlin'.

_You knew what she wanted--hell, what you both needed. It had been so damn long for you both, so damn long since you'd felt anything but guilt and anger and desperation, and God knew you wanted to be something other than the son who couldn't stop his father's decline and ease his mother's anguish and the husband who wasn't any sort of man to the wife he'd promised to love just five months past, but the thought of doing such a thing in your parents' house while your father was upstairs dying by degrees was too much, so when she nipped your ear and slipped her hand into your pajama pants, you sighed and gently extricated yourself._

_She didn't yell or cry or get out of bed and storm out of the room. No, she stayed right where she was, one arm slung across your chest and her ruthlessly-evicted hand lying slackly against your crotch and cheek pressed to your back, but she was stiff as your prick wasn't, hard as a length of cordwood against your spine._

I love you, Leonard, honey, _she said into your shoulderblades._ I love you so much. _It was the last time she ever said it, and on the bad nights, when you lie in the dark and enumerate your endless failures, it rings in your ears and burrows into your heart like a thistle._ I love you so much. _Choked and soft and so full of tears, and it makes your heart clench and burn inside your chest, because her love for you should never have been a punishment endured._

_Whenever the exact moment, something changed over that miserable holiday. By January, the chill inside the house was as cold as the bite of the winter air outside. A week after New Year's, she stopped sleeping in the master bedroom and took up in the bedroom she'd once thought to be a nursery someday. Not that you noticed at first; you were still sleeping anywhere but home five nights out of seven._

_It wasn't until you stepped out of the shower to find her in the bathroom with a suitcase in her hand that you realized how bad it was. You stood there naked and wet and blinking water from your eyes. There were tears in hers as she looked at you._

I'm leavin', honey, she said. She reached out and pulled a towel from the rack and held it out like a white flag of surrender.

You squinted at her, uncomprehending as water dripped down your legs and onto the tile floor.

Where are you going? Your mama's? _You took the proffered towel._

No, honey, you don't understand. I'm leavin'.

_It clicked then, and you stood there with the towel halfway to your face. Damned if you didn't have the gall to be surprised._ What? Why?

_She huffed humorless laughter and shook her head._ I can't do this anymore. I can't keep waiting for you to love me again.

I do love you, _you protested, and reached for her with waterlogged fingers._ For God's sake, my father's dying.

I know, sweetheart, I know, _she said, and reached out to stroke your damp cheek._ And I am so sorry. But honey, he's taking you with him, and I can't stand to sit here and watch.

Pam, darlin', _you whispered, stunned and beseeching, but she only shook her head and stepped forward to press a kiss to your forehead._

Goodbye, Leonard, honey. _Her voice broke on your name as though it were too sharp for her mouth, and then she clapped a hand thereto, spun on her heel, and fled._

_You wanted to follow her, chase her down and beg her not to leave, but your heart was fluttering inside your chest like a hummingbird battering itself against the bars of its cage and your knees felt like loose ball bearings, so you just stood in the middle of the room with the towel hanging from numb fingers. Eventually, you took two steps to the left and sank to your knees in front of the toilet, and then you rested your head on the cool, porcelain rim and cried, towel clutched in your hand like a security blanket._

_You hoped it was just a bump in the road and prayed that she'd come back once she'd had a chance to clear her head and be tended by family and friends who could devote the time and attention she deserved, but the days went by, and she stayed gone. She stopped coming by the farmhouse to read to your father and do for your mother. She wasn't there the day you and George had to move him from the bed in which he'd made you both to that godawful room off the parlor because his body had begun to fail along with his mind. She wasn't there to see your mother crying in the doorway with the hem of her apron pressed to her mouth while you and your brother stretched rubber sheets over a mattress that still smelled of must despite a thorough sunning and airing on the porch. She wasn't there to see you sleeping in your clothes, or to see you giving your father a sponge bath because the man who'd taught you how to ride and turn a calf had shit himself. She wasn't there to see your greying mother on her knees on the front porch, scrubbing piss and shit out of the mattress while the dirty suds oozed down her wrists and seeped into the wood beneath her knees. She wasn't there to see you tweezing splinters out of her knees through the tears in your eyes, and she wasn't there to see you unscrewing the cap on a bottle of Beam and downing most of it in the stables, curled in the corner of one of the milking stalls and watched over by one of your father's favorite heifers, who chewed her cud and flicked her tail and surveyed you with quiet sympathy when you vomited into the straw._

_She was never there again, and it made no difference how many com calls you made or how many messages you sent begging her to come home. You'd had your chance to hold her heart and squandered it, and she no longer cared what you had to say. The calls and messages went unreturned and unanswered. And still you sent more, because now that she was gone, her absence was all you could feel, and your wedding band was an accusatory weight around your finger._

_The last time you saw her without her life-devouring lawyer, you were curled in the corner of the milking stall and crying into your knees. Each sob was wrenched from your guts by a cold, pitiless fist, and you wanted to be sick, but you couldn't quite manage it, so you hitched and heaved and dug your nails into the hay-dusted fabric of your dress pants. That's how she found you, huddled in the empty stall and keening low in your throat._

Leonard, honey, _she said, and crouched in front of you, careful to keep her skirt smoothed over her knees. You could smell her powder and perfume, light and sweet above the odors of hay and absent heifer._

I couldn't save him, Pammy, I-I couldn't, _you croaked, and uttered a cracked sob._ My Daddy's gone, and I couldn't. _You rocked back against the stall hard enough to rattle the slats, to punish yourself for your failure, and hissed between clenched teeth._

I know, darlin', _she crooned, and reached out to brush your burning temple with cool fingertips._ It's all right, honey.

_But she didn't know, she couldn't. She hadn't been there when he forgot your name and your mother's face, forgot the years that built you. She hadn't been there when the man who'd never raised his voice had screamed and raged and spewed obscenities to shame a longshoreman. She hadn't been there when he'd wandered into the living room with shit running down the backs of his legs and asked where he was in a small, lost voice so unlike his confident baritone. She hadn't been there when he'd been too weak and wasted to get out of bed at all, when you'd had to straddle him like an obstreperous calf and force a nasogastric tube up his nose and down his throat while he bleated and flailed and pleaded with you to stop hurting him, son. She hadn't been there when you'd climbed off after the dirty deed was done and sat down on the floor and cried with sweat running down your arms and the back of your neck. She hadn't been there when your father, who had never been anything but proud of you, had turned to the sound of your voice and said,_ I hate you, you little cocksucker. Been waitin' to do that for years, haven't you? _Then he'd looked the other way and drifted off to sleep. He had no memory of it when he awoke several hours later, but you've never forgotten it. You spent the next year trying to drink it away, but there was no booze bitter enough to scrub it clean. You still hear it every now and then, when the days are bad, and you have to tell some family that their kid isn't coming home from their adventure among the stars._

I hate you, you little cocksucker. Please, son. Please.

_She hadn't been there the night he remembered his love long enough to beg you to do the unthinkable._ Please, son. Please. _Gnarled, work-roughened hands clawed in the fabric of your shirt and eyes hellishly lucid behind the film of long illness._

_She hadn't been there when you made your choice._

_So you twisted away from that merciful, solicitous hand._ Don't! _An animal snapping at the well-intentioned hand of its would-be rescuer. You should have burrowed into it, should've lunged forward and buried your feverish face in her shoulder and accepted the solace she offered, but loss and shame had split your sternum wide and laid your heart bare, and the simplest touch was an agony, a harrowing of exposed nerves._

_And with that, the last of her love died. You saw it go, just as you saw your father's chest rise and fall for the last time and heard the shuddering, phlegmatic wheeze of his dying breath. She dropped her hand and brushed off her skirt, and then she rose with the sussurrating shift of nylon and the creak of good leather shoes._

I'm sorry for intruding, Dr. McCoy, _she said with polite formality._ I'll leave you to it.

Pam, wait, _you called, but she had done all the waiting for you she was ever going to do, and she left without a backward glance. The last thing you ever saw of Pamela McCoy was the slender line of her back as she walked away, straight and proud as she went back to the house to say goodbye to your mother. The next time you saw her, she was Pamela Branch again, flint-eyed and flanked by her blood-thirsty lawyer and gunning for your pride as well as your last credit._

_Maybe the death of your marriage was preordained the minute your father took sick, but you've always thought that the petty cruelty of the divorce had its roots in the barn, when you rejected her love one time too many. While most new wives were the center of their husbands' worlds, she'd been left behind, left behind with only the memory of white lace and jubilant kisses and ignored in favor of charts and microscopes and centrifuges, and while most new wives were busy loving the nights away in the arms of the man they loved, she'd been left to sleep alone and hold on to the slender, crumbling hope of tomorrow. She had loved you as long as she could, had stayed and done for and done without longer than most new brides would, and all she had to show for it was a wedding dress in the closet and a handful of broken promises. No house, no babies, and no happily ever after._

_What else but resentment could explain the fact that she tossed you out of the house by court order three days after your Daddy went into the ground and had your assets frozen two days later? How else to explain the bile she spewed when she went before that Atlanta judge and testified that you were a cold, emotionally-abusive drunk who'd married her under false pretenses? And you could hardly disagree when you still had the evidence of last night's bender in your eyes and on your breath._

_Maybe you deserved to get left for the leaving you'd done and the neglect of the soul you'd vowed to love, honor, and cherish, but you'll never understand what possessed her to come out of the courtroom and declare you a miserable, worthless bastard and no-good son of a bitch with fire in her eyes and contempt in her voice. Maybe it wasn't fair what you'd done, wasn't kind, but it was your father, and you'd done the best you could with your heart throbbing on the outside of your chest with every breath. You'd never strayed, never shouted, and even at your drunkest, you'd never raised a hand to her. The thought had never entered your befuddled mind._

_So when she swanned down the courthouse steps the day your divorce was finalized and you were left with nothing but your bones and the clothes on your back, you weren't expecting her to stop and offer you a triumphant, smug smile, a cat toying with a wounded mouse too weak to dodge the fatal swipe. Nor were you expecting her to rise on her toes in a grim parody of what she'd done on your wedding day and whisper in your ear,_ The only blessing to ever come out of this was that I never ended up with your child in my belly. The thought of being tied to you for the rest of my life makes me sick. Oh, and sugar? What you did give me was never that good to begin with. Thanks to that judge, I got all of you that mattered, and you can kiss my ass.

_Words designed to cut to the bone, steeped in the venom of love disappointed. She left you without a backward glance a second time, and all you could do was stand there in the suit you'd borrowed from your best friend and wonder how you were supposed to put yourself back together with a hundred credits to your name._

_She might've gotten all of you that mattered at that courthouse, but that wasn't all she took. She got your best friend, too, in the end. You were long gone by the time that news came down the pike, two thousand miles away in a dorm in San Francisco, but it was still a blow to the solar plexus when you called him on the com one day and she passed in the background, dressed in one of his t-shirts and eating a bowl of ice cream. You could only gape. He tried to explain and to justify, but you reached out with numb fingers and clicked off the com, and after the shakes had subsided, you went to Jim's room and took him up on his standing offer to go drinking. You got blind drunk for the first time since you climbed onto that godforsaken shuttle with a bender on your breath and three days' stubble on your chin, and while you were heaving your churning, bourbon-soaked guts into the toilet of your quiet single room, you couldn't stop thinking about Pamela with her legs wrapped around your best friend's ass and wondering just how long she'd been running in that particular derby._

He pushed the thought aside with a grunt. Pamela had made her bed and kicked him out of it long ago, and there was nothing left down that road but bitterness and regret. Better to stay on this one, where he might still do some good.

He studied Rosalie from the corner of his eye as she rolled along beside him. She was still straining against the harness now and then, but far less than before, and there was a noticeable improvement in her posture as she wheeled herself along. Straighter and less prone to listing to the left. Her eyes were clear and alert inside her face, and the constant tension that had plagued her since she'd been pulled from cryosleep was absent. Now she was curious and wide-eyed and thrumming with excitement.

_Looks like the little bird's glad to slip her cage for a while,_ he thought, and smiled to himself.

"It's just the promenade," he said as the doors slid open to reveal the bustle of the ship's main shopping and leisure area. "Nothing special. Just a few shops and the commissary."

Rosalie grinned as she took in the colorful tumult of red and blue and green. She laughed with delight. "They look like macaws," she said as she watched a gaggle of yeomen pass with trays in hand and heads pressed together in earnest conversation.

He supposed they did, now that he looked on it. Bright reds and vivid blues, splashes of color against a sterile background of grey and white. He watched them for a moment and then turned to gaze at Rosalie, who surveyed the flurry of activity with avidity. Pink lips twitched, and delicate, golden eyelashes fluttered.

_You'd rush headlong into it if you could, wouldn't you, sweetheart?_ he thought, and quashed the impulse to stroke her shoulder. _So much energy, and nowhere to put it._

_Maybe she would do better somewhere else,_ suggested the voice of self-doubt inside his head. _Not with Boswell--only a lunatic would've left her with that sadist--but on another starbase or on a planet. Somewhere with more to see and do and a better chance to develop her interests and make friends. There's not much to do cooped up on a starship. At least if she were on a planet, she could explore her surroundings, maybe talk to people not too busy with duties to give her the time of day. She could observe the local culture and conduct historical research to her heart's content. It would certainly provide more mental stimulation than scrolling idly through her padd and staring out the window all day._

_You're the only piece of home I've got left,_ she reminded him, and in his mind's eye, he saw Boswell ruthlessly jabbing a needle into the sole of her foot.

No, the best and safest place for her was with him, where he could manage and monitor her treatment program and ensure that nothing hurt any more than the treatment demanded. It might be lonely, but it was only for a year, and maybe he could talk to Jim about rounding up some volunteers to come visit her for an hour or two a few times a week. He'd play on their curiosity about this visitor from the distant past if need be, and if he were lucky, she'd find a friend or two, someone with whom to socialize outside of sickbay and the nurses who helped her dress and bathe every morning.

_If she's got the energy and can pass the test for it, maybe I can get her on with the archivist corps,_ he mused as she edged closer to let incoming crew members pass. _I'm sure they could use another historian to catalogue, collate, and document the information gathered on the civilizations we encounter. She's slow, but thorough, and I don't doubt she could outthink and outwork most of the ones we've got now. If her attitude toward her therapy is any indication, she's driven and proud, and she damn sure wouldn't half-ass her duties. If the archivists wouldn't take her, maybe the cartography crew would. They always need someone to update their records and cross-check coordinates. It's not glamorous, and it's far below her intellectual capabilities, but it's better than rotting in front of a padd all day, and it'd earn her a few credits to help her get started once she gets home._

"Penny for your thoughts, Doctor?" she said from beside him. This close, he could smell the astringent sickbay soap, so incongruous with her liveliness.

_She should smell like magnolia or jasmine,_ he thought again, and rocked onto his toes.

"I'm thinking you should stop gawping and take a look around," he said mildly, and settled onto his feet again with the creak of his leather uniform boots. 

She blushed. "Where do you think I should start?"

"Pick a direction. It's all one big circle." The rose in her cheeks made her lovely, and he swallowed to moisten a throat suddenly gone dry.

"Well, all right then." She shifted in her chair and pushed her buttocks more firmly against the back of the seat, and then she set off along the promenade, a fieldmouse creeping from her burrow. He ambled beside her as she meandered past the handful of storefronts, hands clasped loosely behind his back. Now and then she slowed with the whetstone hiss of palm on handgrip and peered into a storefront.

"You can go in, you know."

"Oh, I don't have any credits. I wouldn't want to waste their time. Besides, those aisles look awfully narrow. I'd be afraid I'd make a mess."

He furrowed his brow and turned to scrutinize the small shop's layout. Sure enough, the displays were arranged in tight clusters that left little room to maneuver a wheelchair; truth be told, it would be a tight fit for anyone much bigger than your average first-year ensign. It was a design of necessity rather than deliberate, malicious exclusion, but the end result was the same.

"I'm sure the clerk would be happy to help you if you needed something," he said lamely, and rocked back on his heels.

"I'm sure they would," she agreed placidly, but the light in her eyes had dimmed, replaced by a wistful resignation he recognized all too well. It was the face of well hell and pass the next handful of dirt.

_Dammit._ "I can see if they've got a catalogue you can order from," he offered.

"Thank you, Doctor, but I won't put you to the trouble. You've been so kind already."

"I've been doing my job, is what I've been doing," he grumbled, and turned his head to hide the blush that crept into his cheeks.

A huff of laughter as she resumed her exploration of the promenade. "Getting me away from that Boswell woman was hardly part of your job."

"The hell it wasn't. She's an embarrassment to the entire damn profession." He was silent for a moment. "Was it like that? When you were alive the first time around, I mean?"

"There's a sentence you don't hear every day." Amused. Then, "Like what?"

"All cramped, crowded, hard to get around."

"Honey, is water wet?" She paused to peer into a dispensary that offered a limited selection of lotions and soaps. "The year I was born, the President signed a law that was supposed to grant broad accessibility reforms. Almost thirty years on, and I never saw a bit of difference. It was just as hard to get around at thirty as it was when I was a squirt in short pants and trying to get a handle on the fattest pencil. Never really did, either." She gave a sardonic snort. "Want to hear something funny?"

"Shoot."

"The easiest place to get into was the place where they canned me. Guess they had to make it easy to roll the popsicles down the hall to the storage floor."

_There's nothing funny about that at all,_ he thought, and his stomach rolled at the image of Rosalie being sedated and stored like summer preserves. "What about schools? Doctors? Churches?"

She shrugged. "Most of them paid lip service to being accessible. Whether they were or not was a different story. The churches did better than most by a long chalk on account of the good Lord wanting as many pennies from His faithful as He could squeeze."

"I take it you're not a woman of faith."

"I believe in God, Dr. McCoy," she said. "I just didn't put much stock in His servants." She leaned forward to sniff the scented air that wafted from the shop. "So nice," she murmured, and her lips twitched in a fleeting, rueful smile.

_Probably smells like ambrosia after weeks of sickbay soap,_ he noted. "Something catch your fancy?"

"It's the honeysuckle. It reminds me of my memaw's yard." She blinked and swallowed and turned to study the flash and rustle of passing legs. Then, just as quickly, she straightened and faced front again. "Anyway, no use whining and pining over it. I don't have a cent--or a credit--to my name." She sent her chair forward with an abrupt snap of her wrist. 

He made a mental note to get her a catalogue of the various soaps and lotions on offer. He'd have to limit her to the lighter, less-obtrusive scents; strong ones could exacerbate allergies and impede his ability to properly diagnose patients, but it might improve her mood to smell like something other than confinement and isolation and antibacterial body wash.

From the promenade to the arboretum and hydroponic garden, and as she rolled carefully along the rows, lips parted in wonder as she craned up at the willowy, sheltering fronds of a Risan date palm, he smothered the ridiculous urge to offer her his arm. She was still small, still fine-boned and dainty as she gazed ever upward at her too-large world like a Liliputian princess, but she was infinitely less fragile in her crisp, white blouse and black skirt. She was solid on her bones, more vibrant, and she sat more easily in her chair.

_This is what she looks like when she forgets she hurts,_ he realized with no small amount of wonder himself. _It's like finding a gold ingot under a layer of tarnish._

_It doesn't matter if she's made of pearl and adamant under there,_ said the doctor inside his head. _She's your patient, and you'd do well not to forget it. The last time you forgot, your father died._

He tore his gaze from the sharp, fine lines of her profile and squeezed the spars of his wrist until the flesh burned with the promise of bruises.

"Is it fruiting?" she asked, and leaned forward with a creak of cushion and seat sling, spindly elbows propped on her knees.

He stepped forward to peer the small fruits nestled at the base of the fronds. "I believe they are."

"Can you eat them?"

"You can. You ever had a fig?"

"A few."

"They're a bit like a fig and a cherry had a baby." 

"You've had them, then?"

"Mmm. The ship makes a stop on their home planet once a year, usually near Christmas." He reached up and plucked four of the plumpest fruits with deft fingers. "Whole damn planet is like a tropical island. I guess Starfleet figures it'll help us forget that we're not home for the holidays."

"And does it?"

He thought of his older brother, surrounded by his wife and children at their modest homestead, ambling through the fields with his hands in the pockets of his overalls and breath pluming from his mouth beneath the bill of his dirt-smudged cap. He thought of his mother's house, sprawling, white clapboard and warped pine boards on the front porch. A pair of rockers looking down the long, winding drive and a porch swing most often occupied by rambunctious grandchildren who hooted and cawed and left dirty footprints on the slats. A kitchen thick with people and the aroma of turkey and stuffing and giblet gravy. His grandmother's peach pie, still warm from the oven.

"No," he said, "but it's as close as we're going to get for the next four years." He held out the handful of dates.

She pinched one between her thumb and forefinger and dragged a date toward her mouth with painstaking care. Her nostrils flared with concentration. "Thank you," she said once it was over the safety net of her skirt, and stretched her neck to take a dainty nibble. She sat back and rolled the sliver of fruit over her tongue. "Tart and sweet. I know you said they were the bastard child of a cherry and a fig, but I'm not sure if it's more of a raisin or a cranberry."

"A craisin?"

She chuckled, surprised. "They still have those Frankenfruits?"

"And a few more besides. Pluots, grapples, peacherines."

"Peacherines?"

"Don't ask." He popped a date into his mouth and sucked on it with quiet relish. Craisin or cherry, he loved the damn things. He'd bought them in bulk on the trip to Risa IV and spent shore leave popping them into his mouth at every opportunity. He'd eaten them by the handful and then by the pound, and when he'd turned up at the rendezvous point on the last day with twenty pounds on them in boxes stacked against his chest by grinning Risan merchants who'd happily counted his credits, Jim had laughed himself sick, hands on his knees and tears streaming down his face. He'd still been laughing his fool head off when they'd rematerialized on the transporter pad aboard ship, and never mind his dire warnings against the probability of a gruesome transporter accident in which Jim's idiot, guffawing mouth fused to the fabric of his uniform pants.

Jim might've laughed himself sick and dismissed his medical advice, but he'd also remembered his fondness for them, and he did his best to keep him in a steady supply. If they couldn't be found on their routine visits to a starbase, then he requisitioned them on his supply list. They could be replicated, of course, and that did in a pinch, but the computer's approximation was a pale imitation of the real thing.

_Or the real McCoy,_ his brother chortled, and he rolled his eyes and sucked the sweetness from the disintegrating fruit.

Rosalie slipped the rest of her date into her mouth, and the doctor in him noted the stiff, clumsy splay of her fingers as she coaxed the fruit inside.

_Even with the Loxtan, fine motor control induces tension and intention tremors. Christ, it must be exhausting trying so hard to control every movement._ "Once your PT takes hold a little more, things like that'll come easier," he said, and nodded at her hand as it dangled from the armrest of her chair like an anesthetized spider on the end of a thread.

"I hope so," she answered, and sighed around the bulge in her cheek, an exhausted soldier eyeing the next fifty-yard dash to the trenches and shouldering her bayonet.

He swallowed his date and picked up another. "You're tired a lot, aren't you?" he asked shrewdly.

"Depends on what you mean by tired." She swallowed her date and rubbed absently at one nyloned knee. "I don't feel like sleeping all the time, if that's what you're asking, but there are plenty of days I could gladly lie down and not get up again for a thousand years. Sometimes-" She shook her head and shifted in her seat.

"Sometimes what?" he prodded, but she only shook her head.

"Nothing. Just a bit of pointless wool-gathering. You going to eat that date?"

_Nothing, my ass. More like something you don't want to tell me._

_Everybody's entitled to their secrets, honey,_ his mother chided. _Even people whose bodies aren't entirely their own. Lord knows you've got more than a few._ The patient, metronomic clack of knitting needles.

_Not when those secrets pertain to their health, they aren't,_ he countered.

_Every secret affects your health, leaves its mark,_ his father said, seated next to his mother on the front porch, sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled to the elbows and hand curled around a glass of sweet tea. _If it didn't, you wouldn't see people eaten up by guilt and grief and coming to you with their skin hanging off of their bones and holes in the lining of their stomachs big enough to pass your finger through. Hell, your own secrets might've put you in the ground if you hadn't staggered onto that shuttle and smack into Jim Kirk. The way I see it, you can't fault her for keeping a tight hold on the one thing the world left to her, not when your fists are clenched just as tightly._

_I can't tend what I can't see._

_And sometimes you can't even when you can,_ his father reminded him. _Besides, there's still time. She's brightening by the day, sticking her head out of the foxhole just a little further. What she won't tell you today, she might tell you tomorrow._

He lowered his palm to offer her the last date.

She picked it up with the same pained care as before. "Thank you, Doctor." It disappeared into her mouth.

He grunted in acknowledgment and picked a few more for himself. He popped them into his mouth at regular intervals as he followed her around the room. Now and then, she stopped to study a display, always careful to stop a few feet in front of the table or display case, lest an errant brush of her footrest send them toppling to the floor and bring the head botanist from his office in a towering fury.

So fastidious, so painfully, eternally aware of all the places into which she could not fit, and it made his chest ache in sympathy. She lingered over the samples from Earth--the tulips and rhododendrons and gardenia blossoms, and her lips trembled at the sight of kudzu vines coiled possessively around a stake planted in a bed of black soil.

_Home, sweet home, sweetheart,_ he thought, and rested a hand on the push handle of her chair as though to offer comfort.

"Never thought I'd see that here." Too high, a bird singing its song through a strangling fist. "Don't they know that stuff'll take over if you let it?"

"We've got protocols in place."

"Sugar, I don't think it gives a fart in a high wind for your protocols," she muttered drily, and he nearly choked on the remnants of his date.

"Well, we've got them all the same," he said, and coughed into his fist to dislodge a fragment of date from the back of his throat. When she continued to stare at the kudzu, he said quietly, "I can get you a place on Earth if you like. Emory has a good rehab facility, and it's close to home."

She turned her head to scowl at him. "You wrested me from Dr. Boswell because you wanted to finish what you started, and now you're hot to get rid of me?"

"I am not hot to get rid of you," he retorted indignantly. "I just want you to be in the best place for you. Maybe being home will make things easier."

"There is no home for me now, Doctor McCoy. There's just Earth, and it'll be there a year from now."

"And if it's as inaccessible as you remember it?"

"Then I'll adapt. It's what I do."

He thought of the small shop on the promenade, too small for Rosalie to browse, and of the quarters in which she could not live for want of handrails. He thought of the sickbay bathroom, barely large enough to accommodate her chair and the only bathroom on the ship that she could safely use. He thought of too-high beds and desks and chaperoned showers. In her world, to adapt meant to do without, to learn to live within the confines of a designated cage.

He came around the side of the chair to crouch beside her. The kudzu was a rich, deep green as it clung to the stake with possessive tenacity. There in its display, it looked so delicate and benign, an elegant garland of green, but he'd seen its strength firsthand, had seen it overrun rose gardens and bury trellises and neglected fences beneath its twining vines. Rosalie gazed at it in remote silence, mind turned to a time and place he couldn't see. 

_I wonder who's sitting on her front porch,_ he thought. _I wonder if she ever got to sit there, too._

He popped the last date into his mouth and lodged it beneath his tongue like a pill. He held it there until it dissolved, and then he rose and gave her shoulder a squeeze. _Time to go, sweetheart._ She looked up and flashed him a small, weary smile.

_No lying down today, doc?_ her eyes said.

_Not today. Not for a long while._

He led her out of the arboretum and back to sickbay, and ten minutes later, she was on the mat, sweating and floundering beneath three sets of goading, assessing hands. She grunted and groaned and strained beneath their relentless, clinical prodding, a bird snared within the tendrils of throttling kudzu vines. She never cried, never begged them to stop, but there was no light in her eyes, either, and as he knelt on the mat and ordered her to resist the press of his palm against her spine, the sweetness of Risan dates was thick and cloying on his tongue.


	12. Wish I May, Wish I Might

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim Kirk has an uneasy relationship with Ceti Alpha V and the nightmares that plague his rest.

Jim Kirk had always been fascinated by space, but he had not always loved it. In fact, for most of his childhood, he'd viewed it with suspicion and sullen resentment, that vast, dark abyss that had stolen his father. And his mother, too, truth be told, gone as she often was to some remote outpost on the edge of the galaxy. Back then, long before the last traces of his father had fully emerged from the baby fat of his toddler's face, he'd sat on the back step with Uncle Frank's furious, slurred voice ringing in his ears and the slow, simmering burn of his discipline on his back and gazed up at the stars with a single thought inside his head.

_Give me back my Daddy._

It was a child's thought, of course, wish and make-believe. His father was gone, vaporized in the explosion of the _U.S.S Kelvin_ and memorialized in holographs in his mother's bedroom and in the living room, where he gazed blindly down at them with a beatific, cocksure smile that he had passed on to his son. He'd known that it was so, and yet he'd wished for it all the same, had closed his eyes and sent the thought heavenward with all his might because his mother had told him that stars were magical, angel's breath and God's laughter, and in all the stories he had ever read, magic made miracles.

But wish he may and wish he might, his father had never descended from heaven wreathed in the cosmic fire of a falling star. He came no nearer than the handful of holographs that had escaped Uncle Frank's jealous midnight purges of everything George Kirk and the bathroom mirror into which Jim looked every morning as he brushed his teeth, pasty spittle foaming in the corners of his mouth. He had his eyes, or so his mother and the pictures said, and his smile. Sometimes he'd stood on the small stepstool in front of the sink, bare toes hanging off the smooth, wooden edge, and stared into the mirror until his eyes burned and his vision blurred, looking for his father in his own chubby face. Sometimes he'd reached out and touched the mirror with a foam-slick finger and willed its pudgy, pink tip to pass through its bleary silver surface. His father would be on the other side, he was sure, solid as the wood beneath his feet, and when his boy's groping fingers settled on the fabric of his shirt and pulled, he would come tumbling into the bathroom in a tangle of limbs, grinning as he came. He would be strong and broad and grand, a bigger hero than Captain Archer, the first-ever starship captain.

There would be no need for introduction because his father would know, would see the legacy he'd left in his face. He would scoop him into arms strong as steel and warm as a winter hearth, and he would laugh and ruffle his hair the way his mother did when she saw the neat row of As on his report card, and then they would go downstairs hand-in-hand and banish the demon known as Frank from the house. The great George Kirk would seize the bastard by the scruff of the neck and the sagging seat of his pants and toss him out like yesterday's garbage, and then they would all live happily ever after, just one big, happy family in the cozy A-frame house in Iowa, flourishing right along with the corn that grew head-high in the summer.

But miracles, it seemed, were not for him. His father never fell from heaven in a flash of heralding fire, and the mirror remained stubbornly solid beneath his prodding finger, and every morning when he descended the stairs with toothpaste residue clinging to his teeth as tenaciously as the plaque he had just displaced, Frank had been waiting for him, hunkered over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table and glowering at him with bloodshot eyes, a troll peering from beneath its bridge. On the good days, his mother was there, pale and strained and filling the silence with the twitter of false, desperate cheer as she dished out frozen pancakes. On the bad days, her chair was empty and the stove was cold, and there was only Frank and the cutting blade of his tongue and a box of stale corn flakes sitting in the middle of the table. On those days, he went hungry, and the tastes of blood and spearmint mingled in his mouth.

By the time he was eleven, the stars were still beautiful, but they had been stripped of their magic by sneering bullies who slapped his padd from his hands, and by the perpetual downturn of his mother's mouth and the streaks of grey at her temples, dusted over her blonde hair like ash. Stars, declared the balding teacher who stood in front of his class every day in a rumpled, white shirt and crooked tie, were so much gas, cosmic flatulence suspended in the dark.

_Angel's breath,_ he'd tried to tell himself as he sat at his desk, idly swinging his legs and kicking the one in front of them, but the angels had been as threadbare and lackluster as the stars, and the thought had brought him no comfort.

By thirteen, the stars had seemed as remote as the sea. Uncle Frank had been deep into his cups, and his temper had grown more vicious, his punishments more arbitrary. His tongue had been a serrated blade, and his work-roughened hands had left welts and bruises wherever they could reach. His mother, tired of Frank's rages, took refuge in her work and left him to fend for himself beneath his father's translucent, three-dimensional gaze.

He'd hated his father then, resented him for saving him from the clutches of a madman only to deliver him into those of a tyrant. Perhaps if he'd died in the blinding flash of a photon array, his existence but a single shrill squall in the heart of a med shuttle, he would have found his father again among the stars and passed the unending eons as stardust and comet's fire. Perhaps his mother, too, would've returned to him, her fire and beauty forever preserved as they danced through the firmament. Instead, he'd grown into a boy too small for his age who carried too many bruises on his skin and too many expectations on his gangly shoulders, and his mother had become a ghost inside her own skin, pallid and silent and hunched against shouts and blows yet to come, and forever grieving a life that should have been.

So he'd rebelled the only way he could, determined to leave his mark on a world bent on marking him. He'd ignored the studies that so secretly enthralled him and let the grades of which his mother had been so proud plummet. His mouth had forgotten the sweet music of _Yes, ma'am_ and _No, ma'am_ and _Please_ and _Thank you_ and replaced them with the discordant, snarling hiss of _Fuck you_ and _Kiss my ass_. There'd been no room for knowledge behind his teeth when his tongue had been swollen with smartass remarks and witty comebacks to the assholes who had once tormented him with sneering impunity. Fingers that had once cradled padds and the spine of the occasional antique book rummaged from the dust and gloom of a thrift store curled and hardened into fists, and timid forebearance gave way to the savage self-preservation of a cornered animal. Uncle Frank hadn't given him much, the worthless, sadistic sot, but he had taught him how to fight, how to endure pain and inflict it in kind, and he'd taken a grim, ugly satisfaction in augmenting the welts Frank gave him with those justly earned in a schoolyard brawl. Commendations and praise had been supplanted by trips to the infirmary and the principal's office.

_So disappointing,_ she would tut, and rub her hands together with the papery hiss of riffled pages. _You had such potential, James. Such potential._ And then she would enter another black mark on his record with another rueful shake of her head and call his mother to inform him of his latest misdeed.

It was a lamentation echoed by his teachers, who had clustered in the staffroom like ruffled grackles and wondered what happened to their former golden child, who, they were sure, had been destined for greatness.

_It just goes to show that you never can tell,_ they clucked morosely as they thumbed through their padds. _If you'd've asked me a year ago, I'd've said he was a sure bet for valedictorian someday. Now, he'll be lucky not to end up on some juvie penal planet by sixteen._

_Penal planet? Kid'll be lucky not to end up dead._

_Poor Winona. And after she lost George, too. Such a tragedy that was._ And then they scrolled to the next page and washed their pronouncements down with slow slurps of thick and bitter coffee.

_Poor Winona._ It was a refrain echoed often throughout those years by the townsfolk. By the shopkeepers who declined to press charges against him in deference to her yellowing grief, and by the disapproving police officers when they did. _Poor Winona Kirk,_ they'd say as he sat inside a holding cell with a fat lip and scuffed knuckles and a rapidly-swelling eye that afforded him a filmy, red view of the world. _Lost a good man up there and got saddled with a good-for-nothing kid like this._ And like the principal before them, they shook their heads and entered another black mark on his growing record.

His mother had loved him fiercely, but she hadn't understood. How could she when she was lost in her unfinished world of life with his father and buried in the mind-numbing busywork that kept her out of Frank's intemperate reach?

_Oh, Jimmy,_ she'd sighed as she'd picked him up on the day he'd sent that old T-bird over the cliff. She'd slumped in the driver's seat of her old station wagon, wilted as the corn in the dry, summer heat. _Why are you doing this, honey?_

He'd shrugged, arms crossed as he'd slouched in the passenger seat, the old vinyl of the seat burning his ass through the worn fabric of his jeans and road dust turning to grime as it mingled with the sweat that beaded on his neck.

_Don' know,_ he'd mumbled, gaze distant and fixed on the glove compartment. It was his standard answer for most such questions in those days. It was also a lie. He had known; he had simply lacked the energy or inclination to explain when he'd known it would make no difference.

His mother had reached out to cup his cheek. _This isn't what your dad would've wanted for you._

_Yeah, well, he's not here, is he?_ he'd spat before he could think better of it, and for a moment, the vinyl seat had become a hard, wooden riser beneath his ass.

That particular nugget of wiseass had earned him his one and only slap from his mother, and its lingering sting had hurt more than any of Frank's blows and burned its way into his bones. He'd blinked at her, eyes wide and shocked.

_That's enough, James Tiberius,_ she'd hissed, and her eyes had blazed with a fire he hadn't seen in years, surprise and righteous fury.

_It's true,_ he'd persisted stubbornly.

_STOP!_ his mother had roared, a lioness who had momentarily rediscovered her voice, and she'd slapped the faded steering wheel hard enough to send the vibrations into the steering column. _Jesus Christ, Jim, I've-I've had enough. That's enough for one day._ She'd covered her trembling mouth with her hand, and tears had welled in her eyes.

An apology had blossomed on the tip of his tongue, but he'd let it wither as quickly as it had come. He had been sorry, ashamed and heartsick at stirring his mother's pain, but he'd also been tired of tiptoeing around the unpleasant truth and being beholden to the memory of a man who'd given him nothing but a name and a fighting chance and a few scraps of DNA. So he'd pressed his lips together to keep his impotent fury to himself and waited for the other shoe to drop.

His mother had straightened and run her fingers through her frazzled hair, and then she'd started the car and thrown it into gear. _I don't want to hear any more about this,_ she'd said dully as the police station had begun to recede in the rearview mirror. _When we get home, you're going to apologize to Frank, and then you're going to do whatever he tells you._

_But Mom-_

_Please, Jim, don't make this harder than it has to be,_ she'd said dully, and hadn't spoken to him for the rest of the drive.

Apologizing to Frank had been a moot point, as it turned out. The destruction of his favorite pet project had been the last straw, and after a final knockdown-dragout affair in a living room illuminated only by a single, yellow bulb and the cold, blue glow of his father's eternally-smiling holograph, Uncle Frank had hit the bricks as hard as he'd once hit him. His mother had spent the night slumped over photo albums of her life Before. Before Jim and before Frank and before the tedious grind of an existence with her feet tethered firmly to the earth. He'd spent the night in his room, guiltily glad that he'd seen the last of roaring, clubbing, venomous Uncle Frank.

Not that it had made much difference in the end. He'd simply been replaced with another, and another, none as cruel as Frank but most indifferent to the child of a ghost, and he'd been left to fend for himself, a child of none despite the quiet, drawn mother who absently ruffled his hair in the mornings as he'd left the house on his way to nowhere in particular.

And then had come that ill-advised bar brawl in that no-name dive, when his attitude had promised more than his skills could deliver. Sometimes when he beamed down to some barren asteroid in the vast, cold reaches of the galaxy with nothing but a phaser clapped to his hip and Bones' doomsday voice in his ear, he still remembered the dusty, pencil-shaving stink of the sawdust on the floor and the coppery tang of blood in his mouth as he'd sat in a chair with toilet paper jammed into his nostrils and a grimly-paternal Captain Pike breathing down his neck.

_I dare you to do better,_ he'd challenged quietly. There'd been no mockery in it, no subtle sneer, no malignant twinkle in his eye that spoke of failure preordained. It had been the truth, hard but fair, and in it, he'd thought he heard a distant echo of his father, pride and cautious hope.

It wasn't until the Academy that the stars had regained their magic for him. He hadn't looked at them in years, focused as he'd been on the blood in his eyes and the dirt in his mouth, but as the lights had dimmed in the planetarium on his first day of Exogalactic astronomy, and the artificial darkness had spontaneously birthed a hundred constellations above his head, the breath had caught in his throat. For a moment, he'd been sure he could taste the stardust on his tongue, cornstarch and leaded silver.

_Wish I may, wish I might,_ he'd thought nonsensically as his heart had pounded inside his chest and the professor had launched into his inaugural lecture, and he'd quashed the absurd impulse to reach up and plunge awestruck fingers into that flawless, glacial beauty.

_They're wrong,_ he'd thought with dreamy certitude as he'd gaped at the glittering tapestry above him. _They're not just gas and dust. They're angels' breath, just like my mother said._

Nebulae and quasars and the absent light of black holes that devoured like voracious mouths. Comets and planetoids and meteorites so vast they could blot out the Terran sun. Red dwarfs and white giants, birth and death and power so so incalculable that it threatened to warp the mind if contemplated too deeply. One look, and he'd been lost, enthralled by the splendor and immortal fragility of space. A place for everything, and everything in its place, or so the old saying went, and he supposed that was so even in space, and yet, the cosmos had a way of reshaping itself when the old places and orders no longer suited. It was eternal but not immutable, and as he'd gazed up at a constellation his eyes had never seen, he'd understood why his parents had chosen to ride the stars. From that first glorious glimpse, he'd been determined to explore its infinite possibilities and revel in its limitless hopes.

The promise of the stars had done what all the teacherly tutting and clucking and maternal despair could not and spurred him to excel. He'd reclaimed the discipline he'd cast aside to make room for his seething fury and studied in his dorm and in the library until his eyes had watered and his back had cramped so often and so fiercely that Bones had huffed and blustered and issued dire, grumbling predictions of developing scoliosis or a permanent hump.

_Dammit, Jim,_ he'd grouse as he stumped into his dorm room with bags under his eyes and three padds tucked under his arm. _Human beings weren't meant to sit so damn long. Get off your ass and take a damn walk before you get a clot. Good luck getting on a starship if you've had a damn stroke._ He'd hover and hector until he surrendered and staggered to his feet to shake the pins and needles from his legs, and then he'd force him to stretch his spine and take a few laps in the corridor.

_You'll thank me when you're not in a back brace by thirty,_ Bones would grunt dispassionately as he'd hobbled up and down the hall, wincing and grimacing as he went.

Bones and his future posture might not have approved, but that relentless drive and application had paid dividends. _Four years? I'll do it in three,_ he'd told Pike so brashly the day he'd boarded the shuttle bound for the Academy with nothing but a grimy duffel bag and his bomber jacket(a vow whose power he'd promptly undermined by banging his head on an interior bulkhead), and damned if he hadn't done it. Three years later, he'd gone from disgraced cadet to Starfleet captain when he'd relieved a beaming, wheelchair-bound Pike and assumed command of the _Enterprise_ , his grand silver lady.

And she _was_ grand. Scotty would have him believe that she was made of aluminum and Jeffries tubes and dilithium crystals, but he knew better, just as he knew the stars were born of angels' breath. Her bones might've been aluminum and crystal, but her soul was the stuff of stardust and comet's fire, brilliant and divine, and to stare at her for too long was to be forever blinded to anything else . She had embarked on her maiden voyage with gentle grace and had proven herself a warrior beneath her elegant exterior. She'd shuddered and cracked but never broken beneath Nero's furious assault, and she'd carried them home even though her heart had been torn from her chest, and when Admiral Marcus had tried to obliterate her with the concussive, crushing thunder of his monstrous cannons, she had emerged battered but victorious, a reflection of the crew who lived and thrived within her sheltering bosom.

His first glimpse of space, that venerated promised land, hadn't come on her decks; that had come through the window of a transport shuttle as Bones smuggled him into a Federation space dock. But it was where he felt most alive, where space was most vivid, so full of wonder and possibility. Sometimes the view from the observation deck stole his breath, and he could only watch the scintillating, silver pulse of a quasar as its light washed over the window and breathe a prayer of thanksgiving to his tireless, elegant lady for bearing him up where only angels trod. She was mother and father, home and blessed escape, and he was never safer than when he and his were nestled within her hull and dreaming and drifting among the stars.

_Except it isn't so safe anymore, is it, Jimmy boy?_ Uncle Frank sneered, and he heard the truculent slosh of bourbon in the bottom of the bottle. _It's been invaded by the bogeyman, sullied by the memory of Khan, that terrible monster in a cryotube. Logic and Starfleet brass tell you that he's gone, exiled to a distant planet, a dangerous relic from a bygone era safely put away. Nothing to be afraid of, they whisper as you make your morning rounds, greeting yeomen and young ensigns and popping into the galley to steal a doughnut or into sickbay to filch a cup of the good coffee from your pet doctor, but it's not much comfort when you know he's been there before. The dearly-departed Admiral Marcus told you so when he sent you on your blind fool's errand._

_A weapon, he called him, a superhuman designed and bred long before the bombs began to fly and turn Earth into a toxic cinder. His first breath was taken in a lab, and everything he knew of the world was learned within its blank walls. He was a product of his time, a child of pipettes and petri dishes, molded by pointed heads and gloved hands. There was no love in him, no warmth, just cold analytical intelligence that your green-blooded sidekick could only envy and a ruthless, grasping intelligence that would stop at nothing to sustain itself. When they realized what they had created, the same hands that had made him tried to destroy him, and when that didn't work, they tried to contain him, to bury him beneath miles of concrete and steel and let him languish in an eternal sleep._

_And sleep he did, until good old Admiral Marcus went looking for a war and found him instead. Starfleet is sure they've collared the beast, marooned him and his on a planet far from respectable civilization and thereby ensured that he will never darken humanity's door again, never remind them of their ancient sin, and on good days, when Scotty is singing in his jaunty brogue and Chekov is rewriting the history of the world in Mother Russia's cherished image and Carol Marcus is striding briskly through the corridors in her science blues, bright-eyed and focused and young as her years, you can believe it. Khan is long ago and faraway, a fever-dream easily banished by the light from an alien sun._

_But then there are the bad days, the days Carol Marcus comes down the corridor with a hitch in her step, plagued by an ache not even McCoy's legendary hands can fix and haunted by the crunch of her old man's skull between Khan's pale, cold hands. Or the thud of his corpse as it hit the deck of his precious Dreadnaught. You don't ask, and she never tells. She just offers a listless smile that doesn't reach her eyes and plods on by, and you nod in wordless acknowledgment and wash down your guilt with a cup of gritty replicator coffee._

_On the bad days, your pet doctor mutters under his breath and kneads at his temples and watches you over his padd and from the corners of his eyes. He just so happens to pop up wherever you happen to be more often than not, and if he has to, he dogs your steps and follows you into the turbolift and onto the bridge, where he hovers like a distempered grackle, brow furrowed and arms folded across his chest. He knows, you see, senses what lies behind the bluster and bravado. He knows you as well as you know yourself, knows you better, truth be told, and he knows just how full of shit you are when you insist that everything is fine, Bones, just fine. You'd flee from him if you could, turn from the penetrating scrutiny that makes you feel naked and exposed, an emperor stripped of his clothes, but that would just make him tighten his jaws and set his back, so you sit in the captain's chair that suddenly feels like so much sword and steel beneath your ass and grip the armrests as tightly as you dare and wonder just how much he sees. Too much, you suspect, and selfish prick that you are, you pray for a medical emergency to call him away and afford you a moment's respite from that terrible, knowing compassion._

_Gone, the brass assure you so confidently, and swan about with padds in their hands and insignias on their chests and agendas and meeting times in their heads, but these same people also swear up, down, and sideways that they never knew what the esteemed Admiral Marcus was up to on that dark and lonely moon. They never saw the massive expenditures hidden in dozens of pork-barrel grants, never saw the huge price inflations for mundane objects or questioned the random, sudden reassignment of valued personnel to humdrum postings in the middle of nowhere. They never saw the perversion of their most cherished ethos or bothered to investigate the bustling hub of activity on a desolate Jovian space dock. Gone, they promise you, one eye on their padds and preoccupied minds already turned to thoughts of warm, happy children and willing wives and husbands. You say,_ Yes, sir, _and salute because your leash is too short to do anything else, but in your mind's eye, you see gloved hands and bare walls and the crumbling bones of ancient scientists who had once thought the same thing._

_Besides, you know better. Khan isn't gone. He's out there, fashioning a kingdom for himself on Ceti Alpha V, learning and building and thriving. And he's still here, on your beloved lady. He's in the turbolift, sandwiched by two security offers who would be so much brittle fodder for him if he truly chose to fight. He's in the decontamination shower, spitting water as he stands beneath the powerful spray. He's in the brig, sitting on the cot or standing at the Lexan partition with his arm thrust through the porthole. He's in the airlock, suited up and waiting to thread a needle through the chaos of a debris field. He's in sickbay, his blood collected in plastic vials and labeled in McCoy's cramped, painstaking hand and his body strapped into a cryotube for forcible sedation and transport. He's in the copy of Scotty's resignation that you keep in your padd and in the archived transmissions from the doctor to your bloodthirsty sidekick as he did his best to shatter superhuman bone beneath his pummeling fists._

_And he's inside you, seething in your veins like some latent, malignant disease, put there by the man who calls himself your best friend._

He grimaced and chafed his wrist through the cuff of his uniform tunic. The flesh beneath prickled and burned as though the tainted blood had risen to the surface, one painful demon answering the call of another, and he resisted the urge to bend his head and suck the flesh between his teeth and gnaw until it tore. Instead, he shook his hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his uniform pants and stared out the observation window without seeing what lay beyond.

_Intrusive thoughts? That could be a sign of psychiatric stress, Jim,_ his portable Bones said fretfully. _You'd better come into sickbay, let me have a look at you._

But the only movement he made was to curl his hand into a fist, thin fabric of his pocket bunched in his fingers.

_That's what kills you, isn't it?_ Uncle Frank jeered inside his head, and took another sloshing sip from his beloved bottle. _That no matter how thoroughly you scrub and decontaminate your ship from stem to stern, it will never be truly clean again. You carry Khan with you wherever you go, waft him into the recycled air with every breath and leave a trace of him on everything you touch. He's a part of you now, embedded in the very marrow of your bones and steeped into every tissue. Khan is the stepfather you never wanted, and unlike your sainted old man, whose face you can't quite remember unless you see it for yourself in some old holograph, you'll never be able to scrub him from your mind._

Not that he hadn't tried. After the rehab and the official inquiries, he'd done his best to drive Khan out, consign him to the past as he had done with Nero and the dim specters of previous failures. He'd crammed his schedule with workouts and supplemental education courses and run until his legs had gone to rubber and he'd dry-heaved on the side of the road and Bones had come haring after him in his old Toyota, hands curled around the wheel in a white-knuckled grip and knitted brow heavy and dark with the promise of a lecture on pushing himself too hard too soon. He'd read until his eyes burned and the words lost shape upon the page and puddled like so much spattered ink upon the pages, and then he'd downed a pot of coffee and punched the body bag until his knuckles had blackened and swollen. The proof of his frailty had soothed him, slowed the painful pounding of his heart inside his chest. If he could bruise from a simple workout, then he was still him, still just Jim Kirk, corn-fed Iowa fuckup and accidental hero. If he could still bruise and bleed and hurt, then he was not Khan, was not the unintended seventy-fourth member of his warped little family.

_You worry about that a great deal, don't you, Jimmy, my boy? It keeps you up at night, makes you wring the pillow with hands that seem a hair stronger than they were before, a hair stronger than they have any right to be, and walk the floor in the wee hours when the only sound is the subtle, lulling hum of the ship's engine in your ears and beneath your socked feet. Your pet doctor made light of it when you came to two weeks after your unexpected dirtnap in a San Francisco hospital with him looming over you like a delivering angel._

Tell me, are you feeling homicidal, power-mad, despotic? _he grunted with a deadpan wit more biting than the teeth inside his mouth. Ha ha ha and so funny to a man so recently spat from the stingy gullet of eternity and surrounded by members of his own tattered family._

_But it wasn't so funny later, when McCoy and his warm familiarity were gone and there was no stodgy Vulcan to distract you with his pained solicitousness. You were alone with the cheap sheets and the beep of the monitors and the click of the I.V. that delivered pain meds and mild sedatives at regular, numbing intervals, and those words echoed in your head. Not a joke now, but the sinister import of casual prophecy._

Tell me, are you feeling homicidal, power-mad, despotic? _the good doctor asked in the seething stillness of the night, while nurses roamed the halls in crepe-soled shoes. No sly humor now, just a stony expression and a voice tinged with uneasy grief, as though he suspected an answer he didn't want to hear._

_You wanted to tell him that you were fine as fine could be for someone who'd been lethally irradiated in a warp core, but you weren't sure just where the truth lay on that particular score, and for once, you were too afraid to lie. Lies had almost gotten your precious crew blown to Kingdom Come and given that lunatic Khan a reason for his contemptuous hatred of the Federation and all it stood for. Lies were dangerous, and you were terrified that this one could be the most dangerous of all._

_You weren't lying when you told your pet doctor that you sensed no fury in your blood, no anger burning alongside the radiation beneath your skin, but when your drawling guardian angel was gone to his well-deserved rest, you lay there and wondered if it was only biding its time, quelled by the pain meds and sedatives. What would happen when they were gone and you had nothing but time in front of you? What would happen when McCoy wasn't there to harangue you through your paces and distract you from the incessant itch of alien blood within your veins? Maybe the sleeping dragon McCoy slipped into you would awaken, and you'd crush a hapless longshoreman's skull in your hands in the next bar fight or snap a fumbling ensign's neck the next time he botched an assignment. Maybe you were a monster just waiting to shed its respectable skin and taste blood and terror on its tongue._

_It hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean that it won't. You watch and wait, and every time anger burns in your gut, you wonder if this is it, if this is the moment the monster will rise from the ashes of the cocky kid you used to be. You keep an encrypted log of every odd thought, every flicker of unwarranted irritation or inexplicable anger, and you keep close tabs on the little girl snatched from death's door by a vial of Khan's blood and a father's sacrificed honor. She's only too happy to be penpals with Starfleet's greatest captain; not many people clamor to be friends with the child of a man who blew up his workplace and killed dozens of his coworkers and robbed children of mothers and fathers and idolized older brothers. She writes faithfully every week, glad for a friendly voice even if it comes from light years away, and she doesn't need to know that her friendly neighborhood starship captain analyzes every whorl and slant and line for signs of disturbance, for a glimmer of things to come. She doesn't need to know that you read her happy letters about school and horses and her favorite holovids by people you have never heard of and wonder if she's dismembering her dolls in the dark or contemplating ways to crush the dog's windpipe during the next bout of roughhousing in the yard. She just has to keep writing so you can keep watching._

_It got a little better when you went back to work. There's no cure for what ails you like your silver lady, and the instant your boots touched the deck, your stomach settled and your breath came more easily. Home and heart were reunited, and when the machinery of duty clicked into life and your patchwork family moved in routines as deep as muscle memory, you thought Khan was dead and buried, and you whistled as you strode the decks with the confidence of a king in his castle. It was of scant consequence if you sometimes dreamed of wrapping your hands around my neck and squeezing until my face purpled and my flesh bulged through your fingers or of swinging a length of lumber at my skull as I tinkered under the hood of some old junker and shattering my skull like cheap crockery. You'd been doing that since you were a runt, and if they were more vivid and infinitely more gratifying, well, surely that was to be expected after what you'd been through. Maybe being raised from the dead had simply brought along a handful of ghosts._

_Then came that first order to conduct a remote observation of Ceti Alpha V, that brave new world of Khan and his kin. The officer in you could see the cold, hard logic of it, the wary prudence, but the man in you recoiled. You were a snot-nosed kid again, creeping up the porch steps and bracing to see the bogeyman when you peered around the corner. You considered defying the order as you'd defied so many others, but miracle man and two-time hero or not, Starfleet's patience was thin and you were gunshy about leading your crew into another thicket of shit because of your recklessness, so you swallowed your fear and muttered,_ Aye, aye, _with a pluck you did not feel._

_Your dreams changed on your first journey to the edge of heaven. Oh, I still popped up now and again, but so did your mother and your sainted old man. The former looked at you with bruised, sad eyes and asked why you didn't bring your father back with you when your pet doctor raised you from the dead, why you couldn't perform the same miracle and make her heart whole again. The latter fell from heaven in a ball of fire that burned white-hot and seared your dreaming eyes and demanded to know why you thought you were too good to die, why you thought yourself better than the captains who had gone before you, why you should get a second chance while Pike rotted in the ground and he floated through the cosmos, stardust and bone and angel's breath. It was a question you could never answer, and you woke in the night with the breath stale and thick in your throat and sweat prickling in your armpits and itching in the crack of your ass._

_You dreamed of Delta Vega, cold and dead, a frozen wasteland meant to be your prison until it became your tomb. You dreamed of clomping through the snow until your skin chapped and cracked and bled, and of the fire that scourged your lungs with every breath. You dreamed of your feet crunching over the snow and of the breath of the hengra on the back of your neck, hot and avid. But in your dreams, you turned on your pursuer and wrapped your hands around its forelimbs and squeezed until bones crackled and ground together and tendon tore like gristle and the triumphant roar of pursuit became a piercing howl of agony. You squeezed until hide and flesh yielded beneath fingers gone to iron and blood spurted in high, ejaculatory arcs across the snow. You squeezed far beyond the capacity of man or Vulcan, squeezed until the forelimbs tumbled to the ground and twitched in the snow, and you threw back your head and bellowed into the frozen wastes, exultant and indomitable. You were no man, but a god, and there was nothing you could not conquer. You woke from these dreams bathed in sweat and with your hands balled into aching fists and your cock standing at hard attention between your thighs._

_You dreamed of returning to the_ Enterprise _with Scotty in tow, dripping and armed with righteous purpose. You confronted your resident green-blooded alien and sank your teeth into his festering, smothered grief for a mother who had disappeared into the abyss of a collapsing planet, but instead of being choked to within an inch of your life while your illustrious crew watched in stunned fascination, you bested him. You were the one to rain down hammering blows and drive him back, drive him to his knees and make him kneel before you like a groveling penitent. You battered him until his lips split and his face swelled and he swayed before you, exhausted and beaten. And why shouldn't he? He had deserted you, left you to die without a flicker of hesitation, deemed you as worthless and expendable, and now he would reap his just desserts. He would acknowledge your superiority or he would die. You woke with your chest heaving and the throb of combat in your knuckles, bewildered by an inexplicable surge of atavistic pride._

_You dreamed of Khan, pale as alabaster and cold as death. His flesh unmoving beneath your vengeful, pounding fist. The sneering, contemptuous curve of his mouth. The malicious intelligence in those eyes. You hated him, but damned if you didn't feel an unmistakable kinship, an instinctive tug behind your breastbone._

Blood calls to blood, _Khan purred in his rich baritone, and the words washed over your skin like silk, black and cool, and oh, so delicious. You woke with a gasp, momentarily blinded in the darkness, and longing lodged behind your breastbone like a hot stone._

_You dreamed of the_ Defiant, _standing on its deck with your silver lady crippled and failing in its viewscreen. Only there wasn't a phaser in your hands, but Admiral Marcus' buckling skull. It was so much putty in your grasp, fragmented and frangible, and the sharp pop as you disarticulated his head from his spine was queerly gratifying, almost erotic, and as the body slumped to the deck, you closed your eyes and shuddered, and pleasure filled your mouth like the richest wine. Carol Marcus' anguished cry made it all the sweeter. You woke with your head thrown back and your tongue coated with a wine you had never tasted._

_You dreamed of your pet doctor looming over you as you emerged from your long and dreamless sleep. He was still solicitous, still resplendent in his whites, but when he asked you if you were feeling, homicidal, power-mad, despotic, you did not answer him with a logy, fond smile and an idiotic laugh; your hand shot up and seized his throat in a crushing grip. He struggled, your doctor, dropped his padd and clawed at your hand and wheezed unintelligibly at you while his face purpled and mottled and his eyes bulged._

_You felt his trachea give, crumple like a flimsy paper cup in your hand, and just before your delivering angel took your place in the eternal void, those eyes filled with tears._

I love you, Jim, _those eyes said, wide and imploring. Doe eyes, as your sentimental, milksop mother would've called them. But it didn't matter. He must be punished for his hubris, for the sin of violating his oath and playing God. So you squeezed until your encircling fingers felt the hard notch of bone, and then you let go and let him join his padd on the floor, an angel fallen from grace and staring heavenward with blind, disbelieving eyes._

_You woke from that dream with tears streaming down your face, hiccoughing and snorting like a frightened toddler. Whereas the other dreams had left you with a dim sense of euphoria, of power beyond your wildest dreams, but this one shamed and revolted you. The others had insulted you, had demeaned and wounded, doubted and deserted, but McCoy had only ever loved you, had been your friend and stood by you even when you made a ripe jackass of yourself for the world to see. He had dragged you out of bars and patched you up in his dorm room with his well-stocked medkit, and if it weren't for him, you would be commanding a broom in Starfleet Janitorial and your silver lady and her crew would be so much space dust in a cosmos without an Earth. He was innocent, and you had killed him anyway, a petty spiteful god. And God help you, you enjoyed it._

_They come every time, the dreams, a dark tide called forth by what you know waits for you on Ceti Alpha V. They start two days before the planet rises on your view screen like a malignant sun and stay until you're out of the sector and cruising into safer space, a fever mercifully broken._

_You should say something to your pet doctor, but you don't. You tell yourself it's because you don't want to worry him, that he has suffered enough on your behalf, and it's certainly true as far as it goes. He nearly lost everything because of you, was nearly stripped of his profession and his pride and the threadbare skin he'd managed to stretch over his bitter bones. Contrary to popular belief, a doctor who conquers death isn't greeted with fanfare and endless plaudits. They're interrogated and suspended pending further inquiry and hauled before ethics committees, and every medical decision they've made in the last ten years is analyzed and questioned ad infinitum. The price of his continued profession was his exhaustive notes on the miraculous serum and every vial of Khan's blood and a promise not to pursue independent research of the subject. The blood and his research disappeared into the bowels of Section 31, and your fiercely-independent doctor submitted to random, periodic reviews of his performance and diagnoses, a galling humiliation to a man so proud and so undeniably gifted._

_The hell of it is, he thinks you worth the price._

It was worth it, _he slurred one night in his mouse-fart studio apartment in San Francisco._ Every goddamn second, and I'd do it again, Jim-boy. _Owlish and mutinous and drunk as a Georgia hayseed._

_He's the truest friend you've ever had, and you'll be damned if you cost him one more ounce of tender-hearted flesh, burden him with one more minute of worry. So you keep your mouth shut and close your eyes to the image of his bulging, disbelieving eyes and ignore the doughy warmth of his skin between your fingers and tell yourself it's the right thing to do._

_It is,_ he insisted, and wiped his palm on his uniform pants.

_Maybe it is,_ Uncle Frank conceded. _But you've never been selfless, boy, no matter what your adoring crew and the starry-eyed media think. You've always had an ulterior motive, a selfish streak a mile wide, and you know damn well that if you admit to your little nocturnal fantasies of bashing my head in or breaking your resident hobgoblin or crushing your sainted doctor's windpipe like a paper cup, you'll be yanked off duty faster than you can blink. Your faithful sawbones would hide it for a while, might even sacrifice his career to save yours, but sooner or later, the truth would out. The crew would wonder why their golden boy was no longer on his throne, and it wouldn't be long before the rumors started, rising from the lips of the mess-hall magpies like wisps of smoke, whispers of madness and cover-up and command conspiracy._

_After that, there would be no magic left to spare you. Starfleet command would boot you from their precious flagship like bouncers hurling you from some flea-bitten dive while the night sank low and the shadows pooled around your bloody cheek while you sprawled on the pavement and spat blood onto the hubcap of a parked car. It had learned hard and well what happened when madness sat the command chair, and it would have no desire to repeat that little performance. Your pet doctor would be bounced out, too, victim of his thrice-damned loyalty to your arrogant, thoughtless ass. If you didn't wind up in the brig or on some penal colony for dereliction of duty and failure to uphold the tenets and directives of Starfleet, you could pilot a cargo ship, running medical supplies and staple foods to the colonies and outposts in the Alpha Quadrant. You might even end up on the Jovian run and get to see the cradle of the ship that nearly ended you, would've ended you if McCoy hadn't loved you more than the oath that burned in his blood and rooted in his DNA as tenaciously as kudzu. You could sling bandages and cheap cotton, and if your faithful old dog didn't hate your guts for ruining his life, he could eke out a living patching up cuts and bruises carried home from the spacedock bar by chippy crewmen and delivering the occasional baby for some young yeoman with more lust than sense. All under the table, of course. His medical license would be as gone as his pride and his promising future, and all he'd have left would be his bunk and his broken dreams. And his bones, of course. Always those._

_From acclaimed savior of Starfleet twice over to a has-been who peaked at thirty, a career trajectory as steep as the plunge of that old Thunderbird over the cliff when you were a kid. You'd be just another fallen star, the only genius-level offender running junkers and garbage scows from San Francisco to Io, and wouldn't that just make old Pike so proud, to know that his last passion project spent his days doing scut runs to nowhere and drinking himself into a pleasant delirium?_

_And that's if you were lucky. God help you if Section 31 got wind of your nasty little mind movies. You'd end up in a bunker three miles below the earth, eating off plastic trays with plastic forks and spending most of your time in your underwear while needles drained you dry and hypos filled what little blood you had left with drugs and sedatives. You'd be a human guinea pig, a freak in a Lexan cage, and when they could plumb no more information from your mind and pry no more truths from your bones, they'd let you die, and there'd be no one to know it but the drone who dumped your neatly-bagged body into the incinerator. There'd be no one to miss you, either, except maybe a disgraced Southern doctor gone to seed in some pisspot hospice where they valued warm bodies more than the credentials that had been stripped from them._

_And heaven knows what they might find squirming beneath your skin before they zipped you up and returned you to the stars._

And there it was, the hard, pithy crux of it, the uneasy thought that kept him up at night and made his head pound with unexpressed fears. Bones had worked a miracle, but it had come at a terrible cost, been pulled from the veins of a sociopath. He had been forever altered, tainted by the blood of his enemies, and when it was quiet and there was nothing to distract him from himself, he wondered just how much of himself he had left.

_Would he recognize me?_ he wondered as he skimmed duty rosters and requisition reports, stylus scant millimeters from his idly-worrying teeth. If he died tomorrow and his soul flew into the black embrace of the cosmos, would he find his father there, drifting among the stars like an angel on the wing? And if he did, would his father recognize him and welcome him joyously home, or would he fly from him, appalled by what he had become, what he had let himself be in exchange for survival?

_Wish I may, wish I might have this wish I wish tonight,_ he thought as he gazed at his reflection in the observation window, but his father never materialized from the ether with a smile on his lips and pride in his eyes, and he was still acutely aware of the blood in his veins, hot and sluggish and foreign beneath his skin.

_It gets stronger every time we get close to Ceti Alpha V, pulls and tugs and turns like a restless hook, dredges up old memories like rotten, moldering bones and fills my mouth with the taste of smoke and blood, not all of it my own._

And in his mind's eye, he saw Bones, sprawled on the floor beside his hospital bed, eyes wide and sightless and stiffening hand stretched toward his padd.

_Still worth it, Bones?_ asked a cold, mocking voice inside his head, and his skin crawled at the terrible familiarity of it.

"Bridge to Captain Kirk." Chekov's voice resounded through the shipwide com system.

He hurried to the com station set in a small alcove and toggled the switch. "Kirk to bridge."

"Yes, Captain," Chekov chirped. "We are within sensor range of Ceti Alpha VI."

"Thank you. I'll be there shortly. Kirk out." 

He snapped off the com and stood for a moment, rocking from heel to toe and back again. He knew he should go, assume his place on the bridge, but still he lingered. He had no desire to see that planet again, hovering on his viewscreen like a great, unblinking eye, jaundiced and malignant and knowing.

_You're afraid of what it might see in those reanimated guts of yours, aren't you, boy?_ Uncle Frank leered, and he heard the truculent slosh of bourbon in the bottom of a bottle.

_You don't respect the chair,_ Pike said, all dignified authority and paternal disappointment, and his throat clenched.

_A captain keeps his secrets,_ he thought. _A captain does his duty._

With that in mind, he spun on his heel and headed for the bridge.


End file.
